Building on pressureNET’s recent media attention, we published an innovative update last night and so far our users love it! We’ve added new features and are working to improve the overall pressureNET experience.

The most obvious new feature is the addition of current conditions. This feature allows users to quickly report the current weather wherever they are. These weather reports will show up on the map alongside the pressure readings. We now have a global map of live-updating weather conditions as submitted by our users. This is a new type of crowdsourcing weather data and we are very excited to correlate this new data with our ever-growing database of live atmospheric pressure measurements.

We’ve also added notifications of local pressure change. pressureNET now alerts users when it notices a dramatic shift in pressure tendency that appears to be meteorological in nature. This feature isn’t perfect yet since our data is noisy, and it will certainly generate at least a few false positives right now. We’re releasing this feature as Beta right now and plan to steadily improve it over the coming weeks.

Pressing on these notifications will bring up the current conditions dialog to report any change in the weather. We’re adding this data to the map and keeping it in our archive for future analysis and correlation – we expect this data to help us eliminate future false positive pressure drops as well as aid in forecasting models.

This update will create an incentive for pressureNET users to engage more frequently with the app. Indeed, users no longer even need a barometer in their device to contribute to pressureNET! Our crowdsourced current conditions should also be useful to weather researchers, who can compare reported weather with pressure changes in the area as well as other existing data sets. Finally, current conditions should complement many weather radar apps presently on the market, like RadarNow!.

We expect these new features to spur greater growth and allow us to provide increased data to our current research partners at the University of Washington. We’re also talking with other researchers across the United States and Canada who have expressed interest in our data and will soon expand our livestream program to them.

Our next update, pressureNET 3.2, will focus primarily on expanding the UI additions made in this version. Along with graphical upgrades and fixes, we’ll be updating our main widget and adding a second current conditions widget!