AI Has Flooded All the Weather Apps

You may have noticed a drop of AI in your weather app lately. As companies race to infuse artificial intelligence into every product, the wave has come for the humble weather app.

The Weather Company, operator of the Weather Channel, today released a revamped version of its Storm Radar app, featuring an AI-powered Weather Assistant that lets users customize how they view forecasts and weather maps, toggling between layers like radar, temperature, and weather conditions like wind and lightning.

It can also sync with other apps, like your calendar, to send text notifications and weather summaries that tie info about the upcoming weather into your daily plans. You can stick a voice on it to talk like an old-timey radio weatherman, if you’re into that. Like most weather apps, it gets the data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS).

The app costs $4 per month. It is available on iOS only for now, but the company says an Android version is coming eventually.

“We wanted to build an experience that would be a weather level-up for anybody, really, from a casual observer to a seasoned storm chaser,” says Joe Koval, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Company. “If you’re looking for advice on when the weather will be good to walk your dog tomorrow, you no longer have to look at a bunch of different disparate weather data elements and try to figure out the answer to that question yourself.”

You can find the weather on your phone already, of course. Android and iOS devices typically place the weather prominently beside the time. Google and Apple have both fused their weather apps into their smartphones directly. AI features have since been infused, offering insights and summaries about the day to come.

But there are third-party weather apps galore, like Storm Radar, Carrot Weather, Rain Viewer, and Acme Weather—an app from the former Dark Sky app creators. New weather apps like Rainbow Weather aim to be AI-first. Weather services are also being integrated directly into AI chatbots, like Accuweather, which recently launched an app directly in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Everyone has their idea of what they want in a weather app, what data they’re interested in, how they’re interested in it being presented,” says Adam Grossman, a founder of the DarkSky app. “How do you build a single weather app that works for everybody?”

DarkSky, one of the most popular iOS weather apps, was bought by Apple in 2020 and merged into its Apple Weather service. Grossman eventually left Apple to start Acme Weather, with the goal of making a weather prediction service that better telegraphs the uncertainty of forecasting.

“No matter how good your forecast is, you’re going to be wrong,” Grossman says. “That’s something that weather apps traditionally haven’t done a great job of doing. Our approach is trying to figure out how to add those pieces of context back in.”

Repositories of weather information usually come from government sources, like NOAA or other global weather services that collect data from weather satellites, radar, weather balloons, and on-the-ground instruments. All that data is fed into weather prediction models that simulate the physics of the atmosphere. Those predictions are often generated by resource-intensive supercomputers, but machine learning models have trimmed that processing down, making predictions quicker. (Though sometimes less accurate, which can be accounted for by comparing multiple models.)

Weather apps like Storm Radar and Acme Weather translate that bounty of information by corroborating and compiling the models, then helping to create high-resolution maps and a visual representation of the data, an area where AI can also be particularly useful.