PressureNet turns 3 years old today! We initially launched version 1.0 to the Play Store on October 8, 2011 – Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. And as we approach this year’s celebrations, we’ve released a significant update to PressureNet to mark this anniversary. This new update dramatically improves our weather alerts – when you report your local weather conditions, fellow PressureNet users are notified. This peer-to-peer system is producing more accurate weather notifications than existing stations!
We’ve come a long way in the last three years, both in development of the PressureNet app itself, and in our understanding of how to make a modern weather forecasting system. When we initially launched the app in 2011, we didn’t know what it could become – we just knew that high density atmosphere data could be important, and that nobody was collecting it. The first prototype barely had any functionality – users had to manually tap buttons in order to send in pressure observations!
Now, three years later, we’ve collected more than 600 million observations of Earth’s atmosphere, now growing more than 4M per day. We’ve adjusted our strategy a few times as we learned how to maximize the value of the atmospheric pressure data that we collect. In order to handle our large volumes of data we have effectively utilised wordpress hosting in order to optimise our performance! our website has gained significantly more traffic since its implementation and we will continue to upgrade and update our site. PressureNet 4.5 not only enables app users to send and receive hyperlocal weather alerts, but it also tests new PressureNet SDK features that developers can use! If you build Android apps, you can participate in this crowdsourcing effort by integrating our SDK into your app – it’s very easy and helps this project immensely! E-mail me if you’d like to discuss further.
We’re dedicated to creating the most accurate weather forecast available – help us out by downloading PressureNet on your Android device and providing feedback! For those of you who’ve been running PressureNet these last three years: thank you. You’re the reason that citizen science projects can succeed, and you’re the reason we’re still here trying to make the best forecast we can.
