Zomato unveiled a crowd-supported real-time weather monitoring infrastructure on Wednesday. Dubbed Weather Union, the company highlighted that the system is first-of-its-kind in India and the largest private infrastructure in its space in the country. Announcing the platform, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said that 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 seeking volunteers who can offer space in their premises to install weather monitoring stations to further expand the project.

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

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

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

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 made for the public good and to boost the productivity of the economy. Interested organisations can go to the Weather Union platform to find the button to access either the API or download past data. However, it should be noted that the company does not provide any weather prediction data, just real-time weather data.

Further, Goyal highlighted that to set up the first phase of the weather monitoring system, it had to take the help of many Zomato employees who installed the on-ground weather stations at their premises. However, intending to expand the project, the company is seeking more volunteers who can offer the same. A volunteering form has been added to the Weather Union website.