OVIEDO, Fla. – Is it going to rain? What should I wear? Is it worth curling my hair today?
Those are questions people like Mikayla Beilanson and Tori Sambell ask daily.
“We usually use our phones to check the weather. We don’t go and watch the news station usually so we check the apps,” Sambell said.
Sambell and Beilanson are 8th-grade students at Lawton Chiles Middle School in Orange County, recently completing a science project comparing local and national weather apps including those from FOX 35, WESH, WFTV, The Weather Channel and WKMG News 6′s Pinpoint Weather App.
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“We wanted to see which one was closest to the actual temperature because my family uses different weather forecasts and always argues which one’s better,” Sambell said.
“We went outside and checked the temperature with the thermometer we had, and then we looked at each app and website to see what they had as their temperature of the day,” Beilanson said.
The two recorded the daytime high temperatures from an Oviedo home daily for a month straight.
“We predicted that FOX 35 would have the most accurate weather app,” Sambell said.
(Yeah, we were surprised about that prediction too.)
Turns out, the results from their experiment revealed a different outcome.
“This graph we created from our data shows on average how far off (each weather app was) from actual temperatures. As you can see, (News 6) is the lowest one because they were the most accurate and the ones furthest off was FOX 35 and The Weather Channel,” Beilanson said.
(They said it, not us!)
According to their science project, results found that WFTV and WESH were on average 1.7 degrees off from the high temperature they recorded, FOX 35 and The Weather Channel were about 2 degrees off and the News 6 Pinpoint Weather App was off by 1.4 degrees on average. All of the apps were not off by much.
News 6 Chief Meteorologist Tom Sorrells reacted to the findings.
“I love that we won, even though it wasn’t perfectly gauged,” Sorrells said. “I have to wonder, how they did it though. I’m not questioning their desire, I just don’t know enough about the project. To measure the temperature normally, the weather service puts, what’s known as a ‘beehive’ or box five feet above the ground. It’s gauged from a thermometer in a controlled environment.”
The students conducting the experiment didn’t measure the weather conditions with the same tools the national weather services uses and didn’t have the same specs or strict parameters as the weather pros do. They’re in middle school.
But Sorrells praises them for their desire to learn about the weather and encourages more students to think outside the box when it comes to STEM education.
“Kids today stream everything and use their cell phones instead of getting their news and weather from the traditional way on television, so the fact that they know about our app and did the experiment makes my heart soar. I encourage them to keep experimenting and learning about meteorology,” Sorrells said.
The News 6 Pinpoint Weather App is free in the Android and Apple app stores and is like having a radar in your pocket. It’s available on the go following you wherever you are locally and around the world.
“The current readings you get on your weather apps are from Automated Surface/Weather Observing Systems (ASOS). Each airport and reporting station, you have an automatic reporting station that records the temperature, humidity, the wind, pressure and sky conditions into the national weather service and it’s pumped out to you. The forecast that comes from us are from our computers here at WKMG. We go into the system and update the forecasts manually using data from computer models and AOS. The seven-day forecast on TV is the seven-day forecast you get on the app in Central Florida. On the road, further from our viewing area, it’s automated from ASOS instead of us tweaking it,” Sorrells said.
Whichever weather app you decide to use, we can all agree it’s a convenient way to keep track of the forecast.
Sambell and Beilanson have no connection to any of the news outlets involved in their science project.
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