IBM and Weather

IBM’s new Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System, or GRAF for short, is a global weather forecasting system that uses IBM supercomputers and taps into millions of previously untapped crowdsourced data to more accurately forecast weather around the world, by what IBM claims represents a nearly 200 percent improvement.
IBM owns The Weather Company. By relying on cell phone data from the Weather Channel app, in addition to traditional forms of weather data from balloons and weather station observations around the world, GRAF also draws on atmospheric data collected by planes and also ground pressure data from millions of cell phones that have the Weather Channel app.

Most smartphones have a barometer inside, which is used to help your phone’s fitness tracker figure out how many stairs you climbed. It has been useful for meteorologists for years, because pressure provides clues about storms. Using this additional phone data as a network of tiny pressure sensors opens up a world of forecast improvements. Some of this barometric work has been going on for a few years. LINK