Meteo 2.0: All Producers, All Consumers
Posted on Friday, November 7th, 2014 by ATC in Content Is King with No Comments
By Clement Charles, CEO & Founder, AllTheContent News Agency
Weather forecasts are the ultimate successful TV program, a guaranteed, unavoidable daily fix on every media platform, even if we all know how to look out the window to check the weather.
Complex, and requiring valid scientific skills, media weather forecasts are all based on identical data, supplied by corresponding national weather sources (Météo Suisse, Météo France…). Both strategically essential and a form of public service, implementation costs of networks devoted to information gathering stations has always been borne by nations, who in turn sell data to media.
Today, the number of “private” weather sensors is constantly increasing, be they fixed, such as barometers or mini private weather stations, or mobile, such as thermometers (or more advanced equipment) in cars or on some mobile phones, geotagged by GPS or via other tools.
Clearly, the future of weather forecasting will also shift to 2.0, in so far as its main content contributors will also become forecast consumers. Today, while human beings interpret a limited amount of data, it’s easy to imagine that computer treatment capacities will soon be able to produce algorithms capable of analyzing all data, be it fixed or mobile, delivering ultra-localized, real time forecasts which will also have the advantage of being much more statistically predictable.
There would logically be more precise, up-to-date information on weather conditions between Coppet and Rolle, for instance, than on Jura mountain weather, even though the peaks are only a few kilometers from the main road – simply because they are frequented by fewer potential producers of content.
Administratively speaking, paying contributors would be much too complicated. But a real collaborative system could be set up, which would only offer “super forecast” access to data collectors, activating an automatic function which would upload the data to the network.
This is just one example amongst the list of practices which have been turned upside down through the evolution of new technologies. 2.0 meteorology will quickly give way to richer, more multidimensional, multimedia information, based on millions of data collected via the “Web of things” or the “Internet of things”… To be continued.
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