Weather.com meets Tom Tom

It's a habit of my fiancee, Melissa, to check the weather for the coming week on Weather.com. Although I tease her about it, it is pretty useful in some situations. She mainly uses it to pick out her outfit for the day or maybe see what the weather will be if we are planning a trip. Either way, we tend to use it a lot.

Probably one of the most useful devices I have right now is my Tom Tom One GPS. I absolutely love it. Honestly, I don't know what I would do without it anymore. For instance, the other day I forgot it in Melissa's car which seemed like no big deal since I was just going to work; however, during lunch I needed to run an errand to a place in a town I knew very little about. Of course, I ended up getting lost and took about 15 minutes until I could figure out where the hell I was. I definitely regretted not having it.

Now for the newest random idea. On a recent road trip, I had a sudden idea. Why not combine the two and install them in cars. Now, I know this idea has been done in a way but this would be a huge modification. If the Weather Channel made a deal with one of the car companies and GPS companies, they would stand to be one of the most accurate weather stations in the country.

Here's the idea: install a GPS with a weather gauge (i.e. thermometer, barometer, etc). The device could be realtively small and installed in the car where it had access to the outside weather. The various gauges could constantly measure the many different aspects of the weather. The data would then be constantly streamed to a GPS which would be connected via satellite or wi-fi or whatever to the internet. The data would then be sent via internet connection to weather.com which compiles it. The compiled data is then displayed on their website. The website can then stream the information back to the GPS to give the driver the most accurate weather forecast for his/her planned trip.

Now to paint the big picture. Imagine just 1/10 of the cars on the road with this service. Hell, even less than that would be amazing. All of these various readings could be compiled every five minutes from coordinates all over the world. So, say 100 cars in the town of Belmar, NJ were outfitted with this device. Instead of the Weather Channel and it's website having a reading from just one location in the town, it would now have 100 readings and a very accurate one at that. It could also give a better reading on the current conditions and possibly come up with a better forecast of weather to come.

Sure, there are some things that need to be addressed. The internet service for one could be expensive; however, with the revenue generated from the extra traffic to the website and station, the company may either be able to subsidize the costs or even pay for the general service itself and additional features would be extra for the driver.

I think the possibilities are endless and could definitely help out the area weather forecasting since it is prety inaccurate as it is.

So, what do you think? Good idea, bad idea? Something that could be worked and tweaked a little to be a great idea?

Well, at least I got that one out there. That's been bugging me for a week.

Thanks for reading,

Bob