Meteorologists

inform the world from their backyards.

Hobbyists can now contribute readings from backyard personal weather stations to improve global forecasts. More than 250,000 people worldwide monitor their own weather stations and participate in a Personal Weather Station Network run by Weather Underground, a subsidiary of The Weather Company, an IBM company. These amateurs—and the data that they collect—now help inform the up to 45 billion weather inquiries that The Weather Company handles every day. Their contributions complement more than 400 terabytes of data drawn daily from 800+ diverse data sources, including pollen counts, turbulence, radar, satellite imagery, traffic and smartphone pressure sensors. More than a quarter billion people use The Weather Company’s app and website each month, and thanks in part to these amateur meteorologists, the forecasts the world sees are now hyper-accurate and hyper-local, updated every 15 minutes for 2.2 billion locations.