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IBM is turning to your smartphone to improve weather forecasts
IBM and its subsidiary The Weather Company are working on a new weather forecasting system, one that they say will boost forecast accuracy quite a bit. It's called the Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System, or GRAF, and it will pull data from weather stations, aircraft sensors and smartphone pressure sensors -- a massive amount of information that will be analyzed by the IBM technology that powers the US Department of Energy's powerful Summit and Sierra supercomputers.
LA sues Weather Channel app owner over 'fraudulent' data use
Los Angeles' city attorney has filed a lawsuit against the company behind The Weather Channel app, claiming the app didn't adequately disclose to users how their location information would be used. The lawsuit calls The Weather Company's practices "fraudulent and deceptive" and says they violate California's Unfair Competition Law. "For years, TWC has deceptively used its Weather Channel app to amass its users' private, personal geolocation data -- tracking minute details about its users' locations throughout the day and night, all while leading users to believe that their data will only be used to provide them with 'personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts," says the suit.
IBM supercomputers will power global weather forecasts
IBM's supercomputers might soon power the weather-predicting systems of tomorrow. Through its subsidiary The Weather Company, the computing titan has partnered with the University Corporation for Academic Research (UCAR) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to move beyond today's regional-scale forecasting to anticipate weather at the local level...and aspire to introduce the first model that covers the whole globe.
IBM's AI can predict how we'll react to the weather
According to the "butterfly effect" theory, weather is inherently hard to predict. But IBM thinks that if you throw even more computing smarts and data at it, you should be able to at least improve forecasts. Big Blue is marrying its own hyper-local weather models with global ones from (its own) The Weather Company and creating Deep Thunder, the best-named forecasting system ever. To analyze all the data, the company is building new deep-learning algorithms and training them using petabytes of historical data.
IBM is buying The Weather Company's tech to integrate with Watson
IBM's Watson AI has been a Jeopardy champion and a very creative chef, next up, Watson the weather man. Well, sort of. IBM just announced that it plans to acquire The Weather Company's products and technology, which includes Weather.com and The Weather Underground, all of which will serve as the backbone of the new Watson Internet of Things unit. The Weather Channel isn't part of the deal, but it will license data and analytics from IBM. While weather is the key word with this acquisition, the real driving force behind it is data -- and lots of it. The Weather Company's mobile apps are the fourth-most popular in the US, processing 26 billion requests daily, according to IBM. That gives Watson, and IBM's other cloud services, a rich library of data to analyze and process. The Weather Company also built up a large platform to handle all of that juicy information, which IBM will be able to take advantage of.
