Why do phones have barometers

Delivery services send pizzas and packages to the right place in multi-story buildings. Rideshare passengers are picked up on the arrivals level, not the departures level on the floor above them.

As more location apps are built with vertical location, more devices will likely incorporate barometers to produce more accurate geolocation data. Many industrial and commercial IoT devices already contain barometers, and autonomous systems like driverless cars and drones will likely use them in the future for more accurate navigation.

Enhanced Commercial Application. Location-based games. Resilient PNT. Overview Executive team Our culture Open positions Contact us. Elevate your career and join the NextNav team! One of those partners is Cliff Mass, a professor and meteorologist at the University of Washington, who has been writing about the potential of smartphone readings to change weather forecasting on his blog and in academic journals since Pressure observations are particularly useful for figuring out traditionally hard-to-predict weather events, said Mass—detailed pressure readings might reveal the atmospheric subtleties that tend to precede a storm, for example.

The data could also help lead to better predictions of shifts in the winds. But to be successful, researchers need a whole lot more readings, especially in less populated areas in places like the Midwest.

Last year, Mass spoke extensively with Google about harvesting barometric data from the vast network of pressure sensor-equipped Android smartphones for his research. The talks got a long way, he said, but ended up falling apart.

Google was not immediately available for comment. In order to obtain your station pressure, you can set the reference altitude to zero. Basically, the idea here is to get a small reading zero or one on the altimeter so that as you change positions and elevations, you will know how high or low you are.

The barometric pressure reading on the other hand, will typically appeal to anyone into DIY weather-forecasting. Browse All iPhone Articles Browse All Mac Articles Do I need one? Browse All Android Articles Browse All Smart Home Articles Customize the Taskbar in Windows Browse All Microsoft Office Articles What Is svchost. Browse All Privacy and Security Articles Browse All Linux Articles Browse All Buying Guides.

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