This seems fitting for a time when a lot of Americans aren’t sure what to trust and say it’s important to do their own research: A weather app from the folks behind the beloved app Dark Sky (sold to Apple in 2022) that embraces uncertainty.

The app is called Acme Weather. From their blog post:

Our biggest pet peeve with most weather apps is how they deal (or rather, don’t deal) with forecast uncertainty. It is a simple fact that no weather forecast will ever be 100% reliable: the weather is moody, fickle, and chaotic. Forecasts are often wrong.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.

The app “[supplements] the main forecast with a spread of alternate predictions. These are additional forecast lines that capture a range of alternate possible outcomes.”

(Some of this messaging echoes The New York Times’ recent interview with its weather team: “Members of the New York Times Weather team like to emphasize what they don’t know. That’s a defining feature of the team’s approach to extreme weather coverage. They capture the uncertainty in a forecast through explanations and visualizations of weather data, preparing readers for a range of possible outcomes rather than leaning into hard predictions.”)

Acme Weather is $25 a year and on iOS for now, with an Android version planned. “Most of our time has been spent on building our own forecast — our own data provider, in a way,” Adam Grossman, the cofounder of Dark Sky, told TechCrunch. “And this lets us do things like build multiple forecasts…[and] create any map we want, rather than having to rely on a third-party map provider.”

There’s also a community reports feature. “There’s nothing more reliable than when a person nearby tells you what’s happening,” Grossman notes in the blog post, “so if there are recent reports near you we’ll flag it in the app.”

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