Future Technologies

The future of weather

By James on 23 September 2008

ESPOO, Finland – Okay, not too much on this but it’s important enough to warrant it’s own post. Nokia researchers are looking at how information gathered from Nokia devices could be aggregated and processed to turn out an up to the minute weather service.

Sound a bit nutty? Read on and find out why this could actually happen.

Right now there are about 3.3 billion mobile devices out there. Of those there are over 1 billion Nokias. Now, okay, this doesn’t apply to every one of those devices, but there are already 10 sensors available on devices. And that’s before we see a range of new ones coming on stream over the next few years.

Now, give the rate of adoption of new technologies, see how those new sensors and technologies filter down through those billion plus devices. Now, add in real time data gathering (anonymously) aggregation and distilling and you have a real time weather service. Why rely on fixed-location weather stations when instead you could use mobile weather stations. And lots more of them.

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Hugo Says:
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:48 am

What are these 10 sensors?

I can think of the light sensor (to dim the screen in dull light), accelerometers to tell the orientation and movement of the device, sensors in the camera (and the lense itself), and the microphone.

But I don’t see how these could gather weather data. Maybe the camera and light sensor might be somewhat useful, but being indoors kind of messes it up.

Martin Schrader Says:
September 29th, 2008 at 10:22 am

Several years ago I proposed this kind of service in an invention report. It was turned down with the reasoning that base stations can deliver this information much more reliably.
There is a point to it, but I anyhow believe the high data density would be valuable and there would be no need to upgrade the base stations.