Zomato unveils Weather Union, a crowd-sourced real-time weather monitoring system

Zomato on Wednesday unveiled a crowd-sourced real-time weather monitoring infrastructure. Called Weather Union, the company highlighted that the system is the first of its kind in India and is the largest private infrastructure in its space in the country. Announcing the platform, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said its API will be made free to access for all institutions and companies for the “greater good of our economy”. The food delivery giant is also looking for volunteers who can offer space on their premises to install weather monitoring stations to further expand the project.

Goyal announced the Weather Union in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) and said more than 650 ground-based weather stations have already been set up and are currently operational. These stations provide real-time weather data on various parameters including temperature, rain intensity, total rainfall, humidity, wind speed and direction, etc.

The company has also created a website where people can check live weather conditions in 45 cities across the country. Zomato plans to expand its network to more cities soon. The platform updates the live weather status every minute to reflect current conditions. It also claims signal accuracy of approximately 96 percent. The platform can display up to 12 different weather parameters.

According to Zomato, the weather infrastructure captures real-time data that is processed by its internal machine learning models. The processed information will then be shared with delivery partners to help them prepare and be equipped to deal with any unusual weather conditions. Notably, the Zomato app also has a premium pricing feature where users will have to pay an additional amount to order food during rain or other weather-related disruptions.

Goyal also revealed that the company will provide all institutions and companies free API access to the infrastructure. Calling it Zomato Giveback, the CEO said the decision was taken for the public good and to increase the productivity of the economy. Interested organizations can go to the Weather Union platform to find the button to access the API or download historical data. However, it should be noted that the company does not provide weather forecast data, only real-time weather data.

Goyal further highlighted that to set up the first phase of the weather monitoring system, the help of many Zomato employees had to be enlisted, who installed the ground weather stations at their premises. However, intending to expand the project, the company is looking for more volunteers who can offer the same. A volunteer form has been added to the Weather Union website.