Being a meteorologist is like being an umpire: People only notice your work when you’re wrong.

Yet we’re all obsessed with the weather. Well, according to the people behind a new weather app called Sunshine, anyway. But are they wrong? Checking the weather is the first thing many people do each day, but Sunshine CEO and co-founder Katerina Stroponiati says 73 percent of the population doesn’t trust the reports.

Even if weather reports are spot-on, there’s another problem: They’re usually drawn from satellite imagery and data from weather instruments at airports. That’s not the most granular of data to work with when trying to decide whether to bring an umbrella on that 10-block walk.

With a free app for iOS, Sunshine wants to be the gold standard for weather accuracy. It hopes to achieve this ambitious goal by using altogether different meteorological instruments: People, iPhones, algorithms, and the draw of community and gamification. The app needs your location to work correctly, but the tradeoff is receiving hyper-local weather reports—Sunshine calls them “Nowcasts”—and becoming part of the data-aggregation process.

SunshineUsing crowdsourced reporting, readings from the barometric pressure sensor in the iPhone 6 and latest iDevices, and predictive algorithms that overlay all that information on a map to deliver 18-hour forecasts, Sunshine generates what Stroponiati calls “weather forecasting at the street level.”“It’s a weighted scheme of a user’s experience, community appreciation [you can upvote other users], and how much activity,” Stroponiati says. “Users that update often but also get a lot of upvotes get more weight. There is a whole gaming scheme behind it with local leaderboards and titles … As you get more points, you change titles and climb higher on the leaderboards.”Indeed, reporting the weather rather than checking it sounds like the opposite of what you’d want from a weather app, but it’s actually kind of fun. There’s a gamification element to it: You tap on your location one of six buttons in the app to report conditions of clear, partly cloudy, cloudy, foggy, rainy, or stormy. Once you do, you get three points added to your account. Collect enough points, and you level up from Newbie to Rookie to Student to Expert.But despite all those incentivized local reports, the app isn’t quite accurate enough to pinpoint the shady side of each street for those humid summer walks—at least not yet. However, by tapping into its user base for block-by-block reports, it can tell you if it’s raining at your destination while it’s sunny in your neighborhood. While the crowdsourced data seems like it would only be useful for immediate weather reports, Stroponiati says it’s also used to formulate the app’s 18-hour predictions for each location.“We keep track of our predictions, user-reported conditions, and actual conditions,” Stroponiati says. “When the forecast runs again, our models take into account the above factors and adjust the prediction. It’s like an almanac.”Because it uses crowdsourced data, Sunshine should also grow in accuracy over time as its user base expands. According to Stroponiati, the app has been downloaded thousands of times since it launched a few days ago, and the company’s goal is to create a network of millions of users. While you need to let the app use your location in order to generate and serve the appropriate forecasts, Stroponiati says user data is “totally anonymous and each user has total control over them.”The more people that use the app, the more granular and far-reaching its data will become. And because it uses reports from actual people on the ground rather than meteorological instruments, it has a human touch to it. The app asks you to report conditions based on how they feel, rather than what they look like.This isn’t the first weather app to use the barometric sensor in phones to deliver more-detailed results for your location. Both WeatherSignal and Dark Sky also tap into that sensor for weather reports, although the user experience is quite different than it is with Sunshine. WeatherSignal presents the current barometric pressure front and center as sort of a dashboard. Dark Sky is beautiful and also dashboard-based—and it also costs $3.99.

Using Sunshine feels more like using a location-based app like Foursquare. A localized map is the most prominent part of the app, and you can see avatars of other users in the locations they last reported. The animations are a fun, light touch as well: Scrubbing the timeline at the bottom of the app shows you weather predictions for each hour, along with cloud movements and rain falling from your birds’ eye perspective above a location.

If Sunshine has a weak spot, it might be the lack of a standard hour-by-hour list of reports—especially ones tailored to your commute. You need to see that info by scrubbing through the timeline or reading a written summary of the next few hours above the map. Stroponiati says additional features will depend on user feedback, but she wants to make sure Sunshine stays community-focused and clean.

And it’s not just a bigger pool of users that will make the app more powerful in the future. As phone hardware evolves, Sunshine could become even more capable.

“Our vision is to go further as more sensors are coming in,” Stroponiati says. “People are suffering from pollen and air pollution everywhere in the world. With air pollution, allergy, humidity sensors, Sunshine will not only be able to create forecasts with great accuracy but also to make everyone aware of the environment they live in.”

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