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Comment by sansnomme | Hacker News Reader

HN ML practitioners would probably find the Climacell method of weather forecasting to be relevant.

https://www.climacell.co/

Why is it relevant? Do you know what they use for forecasts? I work in industry and have built weather applications for 5+ years now. Let me tell you, everyone uses the same source data. Machine learning is not going to help predict weather. If it was that simple, someone would have machine learned the weather already and they would be making zillions of dollars with their accurate AI weather predictions. Do you post climacell just because they say AI and weather?

OP i hate to break it to you. but a weather station wont tell you the right clothes to wear for the day. IT will tell you if it's raining outside currently. Consider this, station says it's raining and cold. You wear lots of clothes, umbrella etc. The rain storm is out of area by 9am and rest of day is hot and sunny.

One thing ClimaCell seems to advertise is that they have access to, "Millions of data points from proprietary sources such as IoT, Drones, Airplanes, Cellular Signals, Sat Com Signals, Cameras, and more, combined with traditional data sources."[1] Another of their pages[2] claims they use signal strength on wireless networks as one of their sensor methods, which is where I assume the "cell" might come from in their name. [3] says, "Instead of relying exclusively on NOAA radar data, as other forecasting services do, ClimaCell also gathers information from closer-to-the-ground sources: cell towers, street cameras, connected vehicles, and internet of things devices such as smart garbage cans situated throughout a city."

I'm not familiar with the industry. Are other providers doing this?

(I assume that the question of whether these sensors are at all useful is another matter entirely.)

[1]: https://www.climacell.co/company/

[2]: https://www.climacell.co/blog/virtual-sensing/

[3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90411326/how-cities-are-using-hy...

So are you saying that they are only good at sales? Out of curiosity where do you normally obtain the raw sensor data?

Hi. first i'm asking you a question about why you posted climacell, not sure you answered it? Feel free to answer it or not.

To answer your question, if you want to obtain raw sensor data our government (and some volunteers) maintains a network of thousands of weather stations. Many are automated, many are people doing manual obs. If you know how to write code you can programmatically obtain these data.

However you might be confused... climacell does forecasts and you asked about finding station data? They are completely different things. I have no insight into what climacell does but i am a knowledge person in industry. I can tell you that nobody has some groudnbreaking 'AI' machine learning algorithm that is amazingly great at forecasting weather. If such a thing did exist, that person would have zillions of dollars because they can accurately predict weather better then anyone else.

I thought when they said they use existing wireless communication technology, they meant something like Microsoft's distributed signal processing arrays:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/meeting...

Perhaps using 4G and GSM signal quality as an ad-hoc doppler or metric for precipitation. Is their landing page inaccurate? Are they no different from other companies (besides the good at sales and marketing bit)? They seem to have a lot of big names on their customer list.

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