New York: The team behind the popular weather app Dark Sky is back with a new product, this time as an independent startup. The former creators have launched Acme Weather, a new weather app that aims to offer more transparent and reliable forecasts, along with some playful and unique alerts, including alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike traditional weather apps that show only a single prediction, Acme Weather presents multiple possible outcomes. The app combines its own forecast with data from different weather models, satellites, ground stations, and radar systems. It also displays alternative forecast paths as grey lines on graphs, helping users understand uncertainty.
“Forecasts are often wrong, it’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” said Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman. “And our biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is you just get their best guess, and you don’t know how certain they are,” he added.
Grossman said seeing alternate outcomes is especially useful during major events like winter storms, where conditions could shift between rain and snow.
Acme Weather is priced at $25 per year, with a two-week free trial. The subscription helps cover the cost of running multiple weather models and building maps in-house. “Most of our time has been spent on building our own forecast, our own data provider, in a way,” Grossman noted.
The app also includes standard alerts for rain, lightning, severe weather, and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks. Another feature labeled as Community Reports, lets users share information about their current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather reporting. These features live under a section called Acme Labs.
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS, with an Android version planned.
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