alt Hacker News> strongly doubt that this company runs their own weather stations or meteorological models. Their only recurring cost is API access to the companies that provide weather data
No. But I'd suspect a tabula rasa approach to weather–particularly given it hasn't been rolled out globally in one go–incorporates satellite data, local measurements, et cetera.
Again, that may not take constant subscriprtion. But it does take constant expert monitoring and awareness.
> Considering that there are many free weather APIs
If you're a glorified viewport into these APIs' data, you may be able to stick with their most-static data and fire and forget. In reality, what those outputs mean change as the models and techniques evolve. There are new APIs with new data constantly coming out, and they're often adding connectors.
> a weather app shouldn't have large maintenance costs that couldn't be covered by a one-time payment
The only way I see this working is if the user is explicitly aware the app can break at any time if one of the APIs change anything, which they often do, and that this may not cause any obvious failures, just a decay in the app's accuracy or usefulness.
> No. But I'd suspect a tabula rasa approach to weather–particularly given it hasn't been rolled out globally in one go–incorporates satellite data, local measurements, et cetera.
There most likely won't ever be such an effort - even in companies that are targeting verticalization of the "weather supply chain" (proprietary observations + models + decision support tools) - if only because it would be utterly foolish to exclude the vast amounts of data collected by government agencies and the wide variety of players in the weather enterprise. At best, verticalized weather companies can produce niche value over baseline from the single modality of proprietary data they collect.
The infrastructure for observing and forecasting the weather is incredibly sophisticated, and has been evolving for about 150 years at this point. The quality of contemporary numerical weather prediction likely doesn't leave much headroom towards the threshold of fundamental physical limitations on predictability. This is why there are groans and eye rolls from the weather community each time a new player steps forward with yet-another-AI-model-trained-on-ERA5-reanalysis and boasts some comically small improvement in average forecast skill.
With all that being said, there's likely an exciting frontier opening up as the AI models push towards encompassing data assimilation. But the applications that start to become extremely interesting there won't have any noticeable impact on average forecast quality for your typical weather app.