DES MOINES, IA — As 14 inches of snow buried central Iowa Friday morning and shuttered three interstates, the AccuStorm weather app on Brian Hessler’s iPhone continued to display “Partly Cloudy, 38°F” alongside a chipper sun icon and the suggestion that it was “a great day for a run.”
Hessler, who could not locate his Subaru, said he kept refreshing.
The storm system, which the National Weather Service had been tracking since Tuesday, slammed across Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana overnight, leaving roughly 12,000 travelers stranded at airports and an undetermined number of Midwesterners genuinely curious why their phones did not appear to know they were inside a blizzard.
“Our model is performing as expected,” said Cale Voorhees, a senior meteorologist at hyperlocal forecasting platform ClearSky+, who declined to specify which expectation. Voorhees added that the app’s proprietary AI, trained primarily on five years of Pacific Northwest data, had recently been “rolled out to the rest of the country with minor regional adjustments” ahead of an investor demo.
By 9 a.m. local time, Uber was quoting six-minute ETAs on vehicles visibly entombed in snowbanks, three Lyft drivers in the Quad Cities had been deactivated for poor punctuality, and a Tesla on I-80 outside Davenport was watching its remaining range drop one mile every forty seconds while the in-cabin display recommended a scenic detour through Galena.
At O’Hare, where roughly 2,400 passengers were sleeping under foil blankets in Terminal 3, traveler Pia Ostrowski said her Nest thermostat had pushed her a notification congratulating her on saving $0.43 by not being home, followed by a second notification asking if she’d like to enroll in a rebate program.
A Gen Z passenger near gate B12 told reporters she had stopped trusting weather apps in 2023 and now relied on “a girl from Marquette who posts vibes,” a system she described as “honestly more accurate, and she’ll tell you when to cry.”
An Indianapolis Department of Public Works supervisor, reached while attempting to back a plow out of a culvert his Google Maps had recommended as a four-minute shortcut, said he had stopped consulting the app in October and now navigated by looking out the window, a methodology he characterized as “making a comeback.”
At press time, the AccuStorm app had updated Hessler’s forecast to “Fair and 41°F,” which appeared to apply to his data’s representation in a server farm in northern Virginia rather than to Hessler, who was waist-deep in his driveway and could no longer feel his left hand.