barometers

The thing is, a massive, dense network is needed for weather forecasting, as that solution requires hundreds of millions of barometers.

The barometers are very elevation-sensitive (see other poster, commenting about flying!), which means that the reading will be different every time you move your phone.

There have been clocks with mercury barometers in the pendulum to compensate for air pressure, but this isn't one of them.

Or look at other sources for lightning, then thousands of barometers to predict movement?

Humanity ought to have a much better weather forecast than we have now, as we're nearing 1B+ internet-connected barometers.

(Keep in mind some buildings don't have a 13th floor, etc.) Barometers in phones don't work well indoors either...

I'm not saying usefulness is only measured in money, but money is definitely one of many barometers to gauge if you're doing something useful.

Thanks - I have about 400,000 barometers connected globally right now.

Google continues to add barometers to phones!

Some phones have barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, or UV sensors, etc.

A billion barometers on smartphones taking samples of the pressure where they are, combining that with a set of GPS coordinates and transforming ambient data (air pressure at a known point) into a consumable dataset.

Our second sensor network is WeatherSignal [2], which uses the barometers, thermometers and hygrometers on smart phones to crowdsource weather data and we have already published a scientific paper [3] showing the potential of this approach.

Barometers are often used to improve motion tracking accuracy, not sure if this is a common use case for phones.

Barometers are only good for detecting relative altitude/elevation changes over short periods of time.