Predicting
the weather is no easy task.
But
Vaavud, portable wind meter or anemometer, aims to do just that by drawing up
on the power of the crowd to create the first hyperlocal weather forecasts by
2016 as explained in the article “This
Whirling Smartphone Gadget Could Be Your Next Weather Forecaster”,
published September 15th 2015 b Hilary Brueck, Forbes.
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Founder
of Vaavud wind meters, Thomas Helms and his two other friends had successfully
kickstarted their idea of a portable anemometer back in April 2013 as explained
in my blog article entitled “Vaavud’s
Portable Anemometer is a Kickstarter Project that’s Gone with the GoPro Wind”.
The
Vaavud anemometer uses that uses your smartphone's magnetometer to track the
rotation of the plastic attachment that fits into your smartphone's microphone
jack. Vaavud’s Founder Thomas Helms want to crowdsource all that data from the
international crowd of Vaavud anemometers customers in 170 countries to crate
real-time prediction of weather conditions in a particular area within the next
6-12 hours.
This
concept, called hyperlocal weather forecasts, would make it possible to say,
predict if it'll rain in Jamaica by simply canvassing the Wind data from
several other owners of Vaavud anemometers. The only problem with this is that
people might not be so enthusiastic to be always measuring the wind sped all
the time using their smartphones.
Also,
they may not always take the measurements at the same time every day at the
same place.
Still
the Vaavud is an interesting measuring tool that sailors, drone pilots, crane
operators and wanna-be meteorologists will find interesting to play with until
2016, when Vaavud rolls out their hyperlocal weather prediction feature.
By
then they should also released an updated version of the anemometer that can
not only wind speed, but also air pressure and temperature independently of
their smartphone, making the weather data collected by their crowd of 130,000
people across 170 countries a lot more useful.
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