ClimaCell weather app tells you the best time to do activities outside

How to make the most of your precious outside time? There’s an app for that.

The weather intelligence company ClimaCell, which was once mostly focused on industry clients, launched an app for consumers last August. On Tuesday, it added a pretty nifty feature to the ClimaCell Weather Assistant app called “Activities.” Users can select activities that they enjoy, like running or playing tennis. Then, the app will tell users the “optimal” time to partake by color coding a time slider. It will also rate other times as “acceptable” or not so great.

Why would you need an app to tell you something you can see with your own eyes, or get with a glance at a weather app yourself? Effie Arditi, ClimaCell’s chief of product, explained to Mashable that determining “optimal” conditions can be more complicated — activity by activity — whether rain or shine.

“Sometimes you really just want to know if it’s raining or not, and that is simple,” Arditi said. “But with many of the activities in our lives, especially with health and healthcare, the questions are much more complicated. It’s not just rain. It’s rain, and it’s humidity, wind, visibility, solar radiation, UV, all of that. Sometimes you need to combine many different weather parameters to actually answer any type of question.”

Arditi gave the examples of tennis or fishing. The app will take into account information like wind or tides, so wind resistance doesn’t screw up your backhand and choppy seas don’t drive away your bounty. If you have certain health conditions, UV can take a toll on your well-being. The app won’t exactly tell you when to do and not do an activity. It will just boil down more information than we might consider ourselves, and give ratings and suggestions.

ClimaCell may not be as familiar to you as other weather apps, like Apple’s Weather app or Dark Sky (which, incidentally, Apple recently acquired). But it’s a big player in providing weather information to airlines, tech companies like Uber, and other major corporations. 

Those partnerships are also partially what the company says gives ClimaCell its edge. While other weather companies mostly use public information from the government, ClimaCell incorporates various, and more unconventional, sources of information into its weather models. 

Some of that additional data comes directly from partners, including JetBlue and Ford, that other companies don’t have access to. ClimaCell also gets information from places like traffic cameras. When it’s pouring, it even uses the extent of interruption between cellphone towers to provide detailed information about rain. 

“We take data from airplanes, from cars, from street cameras, and much more,” Arditi said. “The idea behind it is that we assimilate all of this data into our models. And then we can actually create better forecasts, and then, our models become more and more accurate.”

The app also has some other cool features. It has a detailed pollen index, which it breaks down by types of pollen, so people with allergies know when it’s going to be intense, and should perhaps take some medicine. You can also easily enable alerts for certain days, times, and events, to keep you updated on conditions in the times and places you want to know about.

Less useful, but definitely fun, is a map within the app that lets you zoom in anywhere in the world for specific weather conditions. Curious about the weather in Mumbai or Zihuatanejo? You can see the weather on any given street via this map.

The Activities feature will launch with just a handful of activities, like running and walking the dog. But users are invited to suggest activities within the app, which Arditi and the ClimaCell team is excited about.

“We are really looking forward to seeing what activities people suggest,” Arditi said. “We launched with only about 10 or 15 activities out there, but the world is much more interesting than that.”

The amount of detail in some weather apps can sometimes seem over the top. But the fact that ClimaCell synthesizes it all for you into easy-to-understand recommendations about how to live your life seems genuinely useful. 

Then again, you could always just chance it. Who doesn’t need a little excitement in their life right now?