Here's Why Your Weather App Will Sometimes Put A Minus In Front Of Zero Degrees

DENVER (CBS4) - Has your weather app ever showed a temperature at your location of -0 degrees? This happens a lot when we hover around the 0 degree mark and it can prompt some interesting and funny tweets from people.

The reason for this is because of automation. In the field of meteorology we measure air temperature in tenths of a degree and then round to the nearest whole number. If the weather station is measuring an air temperature between -0.4 and -0.1 then the software on your particular weather app may report the rounded temperature, which is 0 degrees, but it may leave the negative sign.

In real life we would just call it 0 degrees without a minus or plus sign. However, the world of automation these days can make some funny things happen, such as weather stations reporting a -0 degree temperature.