It happens every weekend for me. I wake up, check the weather on my phone, dress appropriately, then find myself sweating or freezing to death outside when the real weather is often the complete opposite of the cute icons on my online weather service.
It always perplexes me how we can spend billions of dollars on satellites, weather stations, pressure sensors, tide monitors and weather balloons only to be so completely off the mark day-in, day-out.
Last weekend I was at Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach. The weather had been sunny, but was about to storm. I checked my phone to get some indication of how much sunshine I had left, but neither Yahoo, Weatherzone or the official government Bureau of Meterology had any reference to a storm occurring...
A panicked thought went through me: Could the internet be wrong?
Suddenly I had a thought:
If we got everyone on the beach to guess the temperature, and guess what the weather would do based on their own experiences, would we get a more truthful result than empirical scientific apparatus and algorithms?
Tie this in with a service that is geo-location specific, maybe current photos of the skyline, opinions and polls, and perhaps we use our collective, non-specialist predictions to provide a better weather service to humanity?
It would be both a beautiful experiment and a wonderful idea.
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