How Dark Sky Works

jstn:

I can’t get over how awesome Dark Sky is. Besides being visually & technically incredible, it also employs a devilishly clever forecasting system centered around the observation that weather behaves quite linearly on short timescales:

It’s very much a numerical & statistical approach, rather than a meteorological one. Since we’ve launched the Kickstarter project, we’ve had several people (many of them meteorologists) criticize it because it eschews physical modeling of atmospheric fluid dynamics. And it’s true that our system will never be able to predict six hours in the future, let alone a day from now. But by focusing on the immediate future, and leaving everything beyond to the meteorologists, we can create a highly accurate app that is useful in a surprisingly wide range of applications.

I love this attitude, and also that a couple non-meteorologists managed to create a product that the status quo would’ve never been capable of. Dark Sky uses the exact same NOAA radar data that everybody else uses (including Radarmatic) and has been available since 1988, it just uses it so much better.

I love this attitude to solving problems too. Installing the app now.

60 Notes/ Hide

  1. faris-ghani reblogged this from jstn
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  6. jratlee reblogged this from jstn and added:
    yours today for only $4.
  7. bustr reblogged this from jstn and added:
    I love this attitude to solving problems too. Installing the app now.
  8. chadsnuts said: OK, i’ll buy it!
  9. ahandsomestark reblogged this from jstn
  10. This was featured in #Tech
  11. maybehunterpryor reblogged this from jstn and added:
    Wow. Amazing work. Great read.

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