Most of us have weather apps on our phones, but we often see pretty large differences between forecasts and the actual weather at our location. Well-known TV weather presenter and meteorologist Jane Bunn is looking to change that with a new mobile app called Jane’s Weather.
This app is different than most, as it combines four weather models in one app to create better forecasts. Accurate weather forecasts are nice for individuals to ensure they are prepared and take an umbrella, but for the agriculture industry, this can be critical for their business.
Jane and her team have three of the four main global models incorporated into the app and are seeking equity investment of up to $750 000 from angel, corporate and institutional investors to fund access to the fourth model and its rich data.
“At the end during the Q&As, I am often asked what app I used to look at the weather. I would say, Well I don’t because I look at the underlying data and then analyse that to come up with the forecast.”
With repeated requests for recommendations and no solution to provide – Jane’s idea was born.
The result is Jane’s Weather, an app sourcing information from 4 weather models that update several times a day into a user-friendly yet customisable format to remove the guesswork from weather-dependent operations.
Jane said the depth of data collection makes it ideal for the agriculture industry.
Quite often farmers will have apps they look at and find one was right one time, another is alright when it comes to rain, and so on.
What we’re doing is bringing the best data under one umbrella and letting you see them side by side so you can identify if a particular model is going off on a very weird tangent and can say, ‘let’s not trust that’ because that model is clearly having a bad day.
TV weather presenter and meteorologist Jane Bunn
The app’s algorithm, developed by data scientists from the University of Melbourne, takes into account a range of weather factors, including temperature, cloud cover, wind and Delta T and overlays it with other data including location and historical records, to create a precise and personalised forecast based on what the user wants to know.
Jane said the information could be equally valuable for other industries, including construction, event management, aviation, mining and logistics.
If you need to spray in the next week, we’ll let you know which hours are likely to be good for spraying.
The alert service is up and running and it makes sure that anything you need to know about, you are alerted to. For example, when there is an activity where you need to know if there are wind gusts over 60 kilometres per hour, we can let you know hours over the next week in which that will be a concern.
The biggest issue with the other apps is they have only one of those underlying models driving the weather forecast. You don’t know if that model is on the right track as you have nothing to compare it with – you’re just trusting that one thing.
The AgriFutures growAG. platform has been helping Jane’s Weather connect with potential investors and has already received a number of inquiries since being listed.
With 350 paying users and 1,400 on the free subscription, Jane’s Weather is still growing but the TV meteorologist behind it knows all too well the weather is something everyone is interested in.
“Australia is step one and then we can go global. We are thinking New Zealand will be next and then the USA and Europe because weather data is in global demand, and we can fine tune it for all the conditions across the world.”
Learn more about Jane’s Weather investment opportunity here, via growag.com. Expressions of Interest close Friday, 30 September 2022.
