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WeatherMaster, Open Source, and the Future of Android; An Interview with Pranshul
(gardinerbryant.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026
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Technology
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The fucked-up part is that there are various networks of croudsourced weather data, but I think most or all of them are proprietary, or at least centralized (which means enshittification could put consumer API access at risk).
We need a service that's peer-to-peer (or at least federated) and open-data-licensed. And also not affiliated with the National Weather Service because Trumpism puts even that one at risk.
I generally agree with you. I suspect the current weather station hardware is mostly designed to report in to its corporate owners, but that could probably be worked around. Building a decentralized network for collecting weather data should be possible.
The hard part is that turning the raw data into actual forecasts requires a lot of processing power. My first thought was that it could be done by a large distributed network, similar to what was done with the SETI at Home or the protein folding project. My second thought is that there might be enough processing power that way, but it would be too slow to be useful. There's a lot of lag time in that kind of decentralized arrangement. It would likely produce accurate forecast of what happened several hours ago. I'm not sure how to solve that part of the problem.
Hmm, I hadn't really thought about that; I was just thinking about stations reporting current conditions. But yeah, you're right that that's the important part. Is weather modeling software another one of those areas like CAD where the state-of-the-art is locked up in proprietary shit, or is it government/scientific enough that the software is public? If one were to start building a distributed weather prediction system, are we talking about refactoring existing software to be distributed or reading research papers and implementing algorithms from scratch?