The End of Dark Sky

Slate’s Russell Jacobs looks at the end of Dark Sky, a popular weather app that is shutting down and will no longer be supported after today. Apple bought it in 2020 and has since folded many of its features into the default weather app. While it had its devotees (it was never available in Canada, so I couldn’t use it), it was, at best, “sometimes accurate”: Jacob enumerates plenty of cases where Dark Sky’s forecast failed him in one way or another. (Predicted storms failing to appear is one thing; the opposite is much worse.) It turns out that their forecasts were based not on meteorological modelling but on image processing: it treated the weather systems on radar maps as shapes. Jacobs: “Dark Sky simply monitored changes to the shape, size, speed, and direction of shapes on a radar map and fast-forwarded those images. ‘It wasn’t meteorology,’ Blum said. ‘It was just graphics practice.’” My father the retired meteorologist is no doubt twitching as he reads this.