Dark Sky is a new kind of weather app. It uses state-of-the-art weather forecasting to predict when it will rain or snow — down to the minute — at your exact location, and presents it to you alongside the most beautiful radar visualizations you’ve ever seen.
Dark Sky was made possible by over twelve hundred different people through the magic of Kickstarter.
Dark Sky takes advantage of the powerful graphics chips on iOS devices to analyze and animate the weather. This means that you will need an iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, or the new iPad. We hope to add support for other platforms in the future.
It depends: some weather conditions are harder to predict than others. Dark Sky is usually accurate up to an hour in advance, and can almost always give you fifteen to twenty minutes warning.
Not yet. Dark Sky relies on free US weather data provided by the NOAA, but we want to expand our coverage. The biggest obstacle is getting access to the radar networks in other countries, which is something we’ll be investigating.
We go into some specifics in this blog post that covers some of technical issues that arise when trying to predict the future. And this Kickstarter Update has some interesting info on how we’re turning our predictions into clear sentences.
If you’re a developer and want to incorporate hyperlocal weather predictions into your app or service, we’ve got good news! We’ve created an API that lets you query for the same weather forecasts we use in the iOS app. Documentation for the Dark Sky API can be found here. The API is currently available as a limited beta, so contact us for access.
Want to use our short-term prediction technology for your business? We’re available to do custom development work, and can help integrate Dark Sky into your application to make it smarter and more weather-aware. Contact us and tell us what you’re working on.