Have you ever checked the weather online, only to find competing forecasts from different sites? Did Michael Fish’s 1987 reassurance that a hurricane was
not
on the way leave you with a mistrust of meteorologists? If so, MetaWeather may be worth a shot.
Developed by two producers at British games content agency Ferrago, the site combines forecast data from multiple sources to round up the predictions to an average – and supposedly more trustworthy – outlook.
Currently, numbers from BBC Weather and Weather.com (my top culprit) power MetaWeather’s fully RSSified “better forecast” aggregate, which developer Jason Cartwright says is still in beta.
Don’t bet that there’s a business model here, and don’t read the site as a reply to the UK’s Web 2.0 drought. But MetaWeather is one of the growing number of Brit mashups reliant on the open data available through the likes of the BBC’s Backstage – and it may well have the final call on whether this weekend’s barbecue still has the go-ahead.