
Ask HN: Why doesn't Google own the weather? - _justinfunk
Weather visualization and forecasting seems right in Google&#x27;s wheelhouse. Nearly infinite data to train on, a perfect platform for visualizing the data (google earth), etc. Is there just no upside for them?
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quirkot
Couple things involved here: 1\. There's actually not much to train the data
on. Say you have 1 weather station (that is maintained and calibrated) in each
major or minor city. The GFS[1] has a resolution of ~18 miles. This is fine
over densely populated areas, but oceans, forests, deserts? No data

2\. Additionally you don't need to train a model, since most of the math is
pretty well defined. All you need to do is initialize with latest data and let
it crank. Where most of the development happens is in learning more about how
the physical planet it set up, then adjusting your model to incorporate that
newly known aspect

3\. The weather forecasting market is actually rather robust, especially for
an industry largely propped up by government grants. This probably isn't a
great candidate for 10x disruption here and may not pass the "toothbrush test"
either.

[1] [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-
datas...](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/model-data/model-
datasets/global-forcast-system-gfs)

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thiagooffm
monetizing it in a very competitive industry without a very compelling reason
in the overall company mission?

looks like just a market to me which they could dip into and make some cash,
without a deeper sense of vision nor a real change and impact. (which is where
I usually see google/alphabet striving for)

maybe you see something deeper into that which i'm missing the point.

~~~
_justinfunk
I guess I'm not thinking of it as a product to monetize but a data problem to
solve.

I choose my weather services based on presentation, because they all basically
rely on the forecasting from NOAA [in the states, at least and from what I can
tell].

In my imagination of Google, they could slurp up all the public weather data
and make it better and more relevant and more present than other websites.

But the incentives are probably not there and my imagination is probably out
of touch with the difficulty of chaotic systems.

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vibepusher
dont their phones have thermometers and barometers? If they dont they should
add them and use all the phones as tiny little weather stations.

~~~
dagw
98+% of the time my phone thermometer would just report the temperature of my
office, my house or my pocket. Barometric pressure would be slightly more
useful if you could use the GPS to know position and height above sea level.
Of course that assumes that enough people will be cool with continually
sending their current position to Google.

We have lots of cool ideas at work which basically start (and end) with "if we
could just convince a N thousand people to install this app and agree to
continually send us all their phone data then it would be really easy to..."

