The Birth of Acme Weather
The developers behind Dark Sky, a popular weather app acquired by Apple in March 2020, have returned with a fresh approach to weather forecasting. The team recently launched their new app, Acme Weather, promising an even more reliable forecast than the one they offered at Dark Sky. The app also provides a variety of unique weather notifications, including enjoyable alerts about rainbows and picturesque sunsets.
Unlike conventional weather apps, Acme Weather enhances its forecasts with a range of alternative predictions for improved accuracy. This variation in forecasting is designed to provide users with a more comprehensive understanding of potential weather scenarios.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
Approach to Weather Forecasting
Dark Sky co-founder, Adam Grossman, explains in an introductory blog post that Acme Weather’s forecasts will benefit from various data sources. These include different numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, contributing to the app’s reliability.
However, in addition to the primary forecast, the app will display alternative forecasts as gray lines on its graphs. These additional forecast lines show the range of possible weather outcomes, providing users with a more comprehensive understanding of potential weather conditions.
Forecasting with Multiple Scenarios
“Forecasts are often wrong — it’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” Grossman told TechCrunch. He expressed frustration with many weather apps that only provide their best guess without indicating their level of certainty.
Grossman believes that understanding the alternative scenarios can help people plan for important events. He finds this feature particularly useful for winter storms, where the start time and precipitation type—rain or snow—can vary significantly between models. This feature lets users gauge the level of agreement among different forecasts, thereby giving them a more intuitive sense of the likely weather conditions.
Acme Weather’s Potential Applications
This type of weather data could be valuable not only for consumers but also for other developers. At Dark Sky, the team had offered a Weather API to developers for a fee. Following their acquisition by Apple, they worked on creating WeatherKit, a toolkit for developers to access Apple’s weather data on a subscription basis. Grossman stated that the team has not yet decided whether a developer API will be part of Acme Weather’s offering.
Currently, Acme Weather is a $25 per year consumer app, with a two-week free trial. This subscription model helps cover the costs associated with obtaining various weather models and resources, which can be expensive. Grossman highlighted that most of their time and resources have been spent on building their own forecast model or data provider, which allows them to create multiple forecasts and any map they want without relying on a third-party map provider.
Community Reports and Unique Notifications
Upon launch, the app offers a variety of maps, such as radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks. Another feature, Community Reports, encourages users to share details about their current conditions to enhance the app’s real-time weather reporting.
While Dark Sky gained popularity due to its accurate predictions of rainfall in specific locations, Acme Weather aims to improve on this and introduce some fun elements. The app includes notifications for typical weather phenomena, like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, and government-issued severe weather alerts. Additionally, it will experiment with more unique alerts, such as rainbow predictions or alerts for potentially beautiful sunsets. These will be available in a special section of the app called “Acme Labs.”
Users can also customize their notifications to focus on the weather events they are interested in, such as wind, UV index, or the possibility of rain over the next 24 hours. Grossman noted that being able to try new ideas was one of the factors that led the team back to developing an independent app.
Acme Weather’s Future Plans
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS, with plans for an Android version in the pipeline. The team, which is bootstrapped, includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, who were also part of the Dark Sky team, along with a few new hires.
For more details on Acme Weather, click Here.
