Tag: air quality

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water”, wrote Loren Eiseley. As a meteorologist, that quote has stuck with me over the years. But a warmer, more volatile climate is putting Earth’s hydrological cycle on fast-forward. The wets are trending wetter, the dries are drier. We are faced with too much water – or not nearly enough. The western US is enduring a 1200-year “Megadrought”, made worse by climate change. Cities are running out of water; fires and thick palls of smoke have become a daily fixture on local weather maps; all while a 7-8% increase...

In 2020 alone, mobile apps from the App Store and Google Play Store grossed more than $111 billion from in-app purchases according to SensorTower – a nearly three-fold increase from 2016. With so many great mobile apps launching every day in a hyper-competitive market, developers need to understand what options they have in providing value to app users to remain relevant in the marketplace. We’ve all thumbed through poorly-designed apps and been interrupted by ads that completely disrupt the user experience, it’s unpleasant and distracting when done incorrectly. As an alternate means of monetization, weather-influenced apps are rapidly shifting their model to...

Changes in air quality can have wide-ranging effects – not only on children and other sensitive groups, but on everyone when air quality decreases considerably. In May 2018, we announced the addition of air quality endpoints to the AerisWeather API.  Today, as we continue to expand our air quality datasets, we are announcing a new air quality map layer within AerisWeather Maps.  The layer displays Air Quality Index (AQI) badges for locations globally and allows users to quickly visualize areas of concern.  Additionally, large wildfires can negatively affect local and regional air quality. Therefore, we are also releasing a new...

A couple weeks ago we introduced the WeatherBlox wizard, but we weren’t going to stop there. We doubled down and added Air Quality views and a full page layout to our WeatherBlox Wizard. Air Quality Views There are 3 views available with our new AQI views, each of which provides an elegant depiction of pollutant data in or near your neighborhood. You can easily configure your preferred view in Step 3 of the wizard under the Data Type option. Let’s go over each individual view: Observations The observations view generates an estimated AQI based on a combination of nearby observation...

An old joke insists that Californians don’t trust air they can’t actually see. Unfortunately, air pollution is no laughing matter. More than 95% of the world’s population breathes unsafe air, according to recent research. People living in urban areas in the world’s developing countries are most at risk from both outdoor and indoor air pollution. Experts estimate that exposure to air pollution contributed to more than 6 million deaths worldwide in 2017. A staggering one in three people worldwide faces the double whammy of unsafe air, both indoors and out. Globally an estimated 2.9 billion people are at risk. The...