How Vaavud plans to introduce the first hyperlocal weather forecasts by 2016

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. 

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.