One, Carrot Weather – which, like Dark Sky before it, has an ardent social media fanbase – also aims to lighten the mood. Weather apps with personality are a burgeoning subsection of the market. She adds that poor infrastructure means that there are no longer tornado sirens in her town, so extreme alerts on her phone are a matter of survival. “Our weather is so crazy now,” she says, of the recent 116F (46C) Texas weather. Her primary concern is keeping her car safe from hail. “From March through to October, I’m a weather channel whore,” she says. Now she checks three apps, watches storms on their radar functions, is signed up to severe weather notifications from the National Weather Service and watches the weather on TV. Simms is 65 when she was in her 40s and 50s, she says, she didn’t care about the weather at all. Carrot Weather users can unlock ‘achievements’ for living through three days of straight rain or a dangerously high UV index It was hard.” She has also experienced storms with baseball-sized hailstones which “creamed everybody’s cars – mine was totalled”, she says. Little shards of glass stuck in the walls. You can understand why Simms might appreciate a bit of gallows humor, having lived through two tornadoes, including one which “blew out all the windows in the back of my house. I’m fairly sure the thermometer just says: ‘Satan’s butthole’.” It’s soul-sucking.” One of her favorite apps is called What the Forecast?! and provides light relief on sweltering hot days with forecasts that read, along with the temperature: “You don’t have to look. Jennifer Simms lives in Texas where, she says, “it’s fucking hot, girl. There are certainly plenty out there, catering to a variety of needs: more than 10,000 apps have the word “weather” in the title in Android and iPhone app stores. Jeremiah Lasquety-Reyes, a senior analyst for Statista, says this new weather app ecosystem is only going to grow, owing to the climate crisis, as well as a general trend towards “digitizing one’s life and schedule”. In April, when Apple’s weather app went down, there was such outrage that the temporary glitch became an international news story.įifty per cent of US smartphone users regularly use weather apps according to Statista, weather apps will make approximately $1.5bn in revenue in 2023, a leap from $530m in 2017. There is still palpable grief, in the wake of the closure of the short-term weather prediction app Dark Sky, late last year, after its acquisition by Apple. On social media there is almost as much chat about weather apps as there is about the weather: much of it is ire about inaccurate forecasts some of it is from users who admit checking weather apps more than seems logical. Preoccupation with weather apps is commonplace in our current unsettled atmosphere. It’s unprecedented, so it’s hard to tell if your anxiety is proportional to the threat you’re feeling.”įifty per cent of US smartphone users regularly use weather apps. In many ways, she points out, it would be odd not to feel anxious, given the climate emergency. “That has made my obsession quite a lot worse,” she says. “It asks: ‘do you want to know about record temperatures today?’” Then a quiz appears, asking whether the day’s temperature is above or below average, historically. She has three weather apps on her smartphone, but recently a widget has started popping up, unbidden, on Microsoft Edge on her computer. “I would think: so it’s not a record temperature in Liverpool today. During last summer’s unprecedented heatwave in the UK, she says, “there was a lot of talk of: ‘will we make it to 40C?’ I kept checking in the hope that we wouldn’t.” She would watch the numbers rise on her app, with trepidation, and would then feel relieved to see them peak, thinking: “We’re on our way down and things haven’t burst into flames.” She would check different locations. It’s behavior that Jess Green, who lives in Liverpool, England, might relate to. Or else he looks at the weather in other places, where it is less hot, and he has family, and will think: “Oh, maybe I can just go there for a little bit.” The temperature in Austin has been in the 110s Fahrenheit (40s Celsius) for weeks he’ll keep checking the apps, even when he knows no change is likely.
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