• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, July 1, 2015

Weather is unique: by turns mundane and spectacular, it’s one of the few things that affects everyone. It changes in real time, requiring constant updates to variable forecasts. It’s a natural (get it?) vehicle for advertising in a whole slew of categories, from apparel to tourism to insurance and beyond. And it’s location-specific, making it a killer app for mobile.

On that note, global weather media provider AccuWeather is expanding its mobile presence, bringing its MinuteCast service to new countries.

Already live in the U.S. and Western Europe, the MinuteCast service is now available in a number of countries across Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Meanwhile AccuWeather also recently became the only weather organization in the world with the ability to distribute weather forecasts in China.

Based on highly local, live weather data updated every five minutes, AccuWeather’s MinuteCast service alerts mobile users when they are about to experience a weather event. For example, based on local weather patterns, it might advise a user at Central Park that it’s going to start raining where they are in 20 minutes, while another user at the Statue of Liberty would get an alert for rain in 35 minutes.

According to Chief Digital Officer Steve R. Smith, on the advertising side AccuWeather has embraced programmatic alongside mobile, enabling advertisers to automatically execute mobile ads based on location and weather conditions, among other factors.  

Smith added that AccuWeather has been loaded as an app on one third of all Android phones, thanks in large part to OEM agreements with manufacturers including Samsung, LG , Motorola, and Huawei. It delivers weather information in 100 languages and dialects in around 120 countries around the globe, and its Web and mobile properties attracted 51.2 million unique users in the U.S. in May 2015, per comScore.