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The next iPhones were announced and sold out (just as Apple planned), the fanbois lined up, camped out, and stopped mocking big phones.
A couple people noticed it came equipped with a barometer. Yawn. Android had them for years, nobody cares.
Well one guy does care. He is Cliff Mass, of the Weather Blog. Why is Cliff so excited:
Because they offer the chance to get a extraordinary density of pressure observations, which provides the potential to describe small scale atmospheric structures. Structures we need to know about if we are to predict key weather features like strong thunderstorms.
To forecast fine-scale weather features (like thunderstorms), you need a fine-scale description of the atmosphere, and the current observational network is often insufficient. We need millions of observations per hour over the U.S. to do the job.
But collecting pressure with current meteorological technology is too expensive, and too sparsely deployed. Even throwing in the rather capable but utterly ignored personal weather stations, there just isn't enough density to allow fine grained forecasts or alerts.
Cliff Mass notes that Android, and soon iPhone, pressure readings are being collected by PressureNet an open source from a project by Cumulonimbus available on GitHub. These anonymous readings from Android devices are collected, and provided to weather researchers. An iPhone app is in the works.
The app is free for Android users, and the iPhone version is under development.
There are other barometer apps available, but none of them do anything other than provide you with a barometer reading, or graph, which, unless you are something of a weather geek, (or prone to weather induced headaches), serve only a marginal interest. Pressurenet can run quietly with no user intervention, or it can feed your geek with regional readings in a zoom-able map. The battery usage is low, and you can launch it and forget it on your barometer equipped phone.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TK on Thursday October 23 2014, @01:46PM
Measure the height of the building in lengths of barometers by flipping it end over end for the entire height of the building.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum