We were in Prospect Park when George pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, and announced: “It’s gonna rain in 12 minutes.”

George’s girlfriend rolled her eyes. My boyfriend tilted his head back and stared up at the sky, which was gray but not particularly menacing. Then he looked at his own phone. “The Weather Channel app says 30 percent,” he said. “So maybe we stay a little longer?”

George shrugged and put his phone back in his pocket. We went back to talking, but our eyes strayed up. Weather is typically derided as boring, “the last refuge of the unimaginative” attributed to Oscar Wilde, but this had become a competition — whose app was better — and we all had something to lose, namely dry clothes and decent hair. “Was that a drop?” we asked at intervals, studying the sky for secrets.

I have a theory that Wilde pooh-poohed weather because meteorology was invented in his lifetime — he was sick of hearing people talk about this newly predictable thing. Before the 1860s, people attempted with limited success to understand the weather by observing animal behavior (e.g., if an anthill closed there’d be a thunderstorm) or planetary movements or “rings and halos” in the sky. Now forecasts are 95 to 97 percent accurate, according to a spokesman for the American Meterological Association — better than many forms of birth control — and forecasting is omnipresent, helping us decide what to wear, how to commute, where and when to socialize, and whether or not we travel.

But we don’t follow forecasts only for practical reasons. In our era of climate change, weather news is essentially the ultimate reality show, all of us spectators and members of the cast. I’d experienced both the former and latter during Hurricane Sandy. When the superstorm hit New York City, I’d only recently moved into my own place, sans roommates, and was riding an independence kick that resulted in me crouching alone in my dark studio apartment, wearing a bike helmet and listening to weather on a battery-powered radio because the smartphone I’d finally caved and bought hadn’t arrived yet. Through the long, wind-whipped night, weather news was my only connection to the world.

A lot of other people must have felt the same way, because The Weather Channel’s network ratings sailed off the charts during Sandy, and the tech industry was right on the network’s heels. Apple had just added weather updates to its operating system a year before, after Hurricane Irene. Since these hurricanes, plus typhoons Bopha and Haiyan in the Philippines and droughts (least sexy but one of the most deadly of weather calamities) across Africa and the Americas, the internet has become a nonstop weather report: essays of loss, videos of wild surf, calls to action by relief organizations, and photos of flooded streets, ravaged buildings, and gloomy farmers. “Weather is nonpartisan,” Harry Enten, senior political writer at ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight, admitted weatherphile, and longtime daily forecaster, told me when I asked why he spends his free time writing weather forecasts. “It doesn’t upset people one way or another, but everyone cares.”

Back in Prospect Park, exactly 12 minutes after George made his prediction, we felt the first drops. We ran for shelter in one of the tunnels off the great lawn, followed by other park-goers who’d been less prepared to dash at a moment’s notice. “Sorry, guys,” said my boyfriend, but his sheepishness was quickly overrun by curiosity, and as the rain roared overhead he got out his phone. “Hey, George, what’s that app called?”