So today I made a trip to the Tallahassee
National Weather Service Office to compare my iPhone 6 plus and Kestrel
4500
barometers to the Precision Digital Barometer on site. In the above
photo I am comparing "sensor pressure" ie pressure
of the sensor only (not corrected to sea level). If we round off to
1/10 of a millibar here is what we get
1014.3 NWSO Tallahasse
1014.2 iPhone 6 plus
1014.2 Kestrel 4500 BT
All within 0.1 mbar which is pretty good. The iPhone 6 barometer's
sensor is the new
BMP 280 made by Bosch according to Apple.
It has an operation range of 300 to 1100 mbars. The app I used is
called Barometer ++. It determines altitude by GPS and correctly
found my home altitude of 14 feet. I've check it daily for a week
and It is within 0.1 mbar of my Kestrel. At the Tallahasseee NWSO it
had trouble with the altitude because I was inside and couldn't get a GPS
fix. Outside for what I do - measure the pressure inside the eye of
a typhoon or hurricane it would work just fine I believe. Look for
more iPhone 6 apps to come out down the road that have data logging and
graphics. My next photo is of the station barometer vs my Kestrel
4500 with the correct altitude put in
So the difference when you account for
altitude - in this case 173 feet - is 0.3 milli bar. Not bad at all.
The Kestrel is calibrated at the factory to a known standard and in the
field you would input the altitude offset. With an accurate
barometer in the iPhone 6 it will be a useful tool for getting a cross
section of pressures in hurricanes and typhoons. The acid test would
be to take all three barometers in a pressure chamber and compare values
from say 900 mbar and up every 20mbar then you could plot a calibration
curve and compare.
11-17-2014 update: I've found a better barometer called "barometer
for iPhone 6" on the app store. You can manually input the altitude
or use the automatically derived GPS value. It looks more like a
traditional barometer and has a set button to tag the current reading -
just like a regular old time barometer. The numbers don't jump
around either if you use a known altitude setting. Only goes down to 960
mbar but I'll bet the digital display goes down lower.
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