I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
just because it knows where you are, doesn’t mean it has measurement equipment there.
Especially because in some places, with more or less frequency, it can be raining somewhere and not raining a mile from there, and randomly just interspersed around randomly. I hear Florida is exactly like that and it makes them extremely hostile towards meteorologists.
Mine literally has access to a Netatmo and it’s still shite
But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
Because they’ve never been able to do that…
When they say “50% chance of rain”, it doesn’t meant there’s a 50/50 chance it rains where you’re located
It’s that for the broadcast area, about half is gonna get rain.
Unless I misunderstood what you said, that’s not it either. 50% chance of rain means exactly that: according to their forecast models, there is a 50% change it will rain. Snopes did a writeup of this.
Darksky could do it back in the day more or less. you’d get messages that it would rain in about 15 minutes and stop in the next 30.
Thing is, precep maps don’t work everywhere. You’re probably in a location like me where a thick front rolling through will almost always bring rain. If you get into warmer tropical climates, rainclouds will just poof out of nowhere and drop rain on your ass while other crazy fronts will pass over with nothing but some dark clouds.
Apple bought darksky, and Apple Weather now has that feature that notifies you before it rains.
Apple butchered the integration. I fucking hate the stock iOS weather app 😤🤬
yeah, i don’t run apple so they don’t exist for me anymore.
That sucks. It is so frustrating when large companies shut down widely used public APIs.
Apple bought darksky
OMG I had no idea. Ouch.
Weather prediction at point locations is extremely challenging to get right because we simply can’t observe and make predictions for every single square inch of the earth. Many weather models are run on grids with boxes about the size of a few kilometers at the smallest scale, which means that any physical process in the atmosphere that is the size of that box or smaller won’t be represented well by the model.
Specifically on your point about clouds passing over your location, cloud and precipitation formation is even more challenging. Clouds and precipitation form due to atmospheric processes ranging from hundreds of kilometers all the way down to micrometers, which practically means the weather models are making an educated guess (albeit a very good one that is informed by scientific research) about when and where clouds will form. And when a model does predict a cloud, it will cover an entire grid box.
Finally, I saw you made a comment about how machine learning should improve forecasts, and in fact it does! But the weather community is still working on data driven models (as opposed to models that solve physical atmospheric equations), and most of them are run by private companies so their output is not free. As these data driven models get better, it may be possible that they will be able to make predictions at scales less than a kilometer.
This is a really thoughtful and educational answer. I learned a lot from this. Thank you!
I know any in my case. I’m in a black hole of info. The nearest weather station is over 30 miles away and it’s not remotely accurate for my location because of terrain changes between here and there. There isn’t even a weather station in my overly large and oddly shaped county.
We went so far as to contact the people in charge of weather stations to see if we could set one up in our yard and while there was some initial excitement from them they eventually ghosted us.
Why not buy a cheap weather station for kids that come with Bluetooth or server? There must be one with a web page on it ready to go for the less technically inclined.
Or just ask your nerd nephew to do it for you.
I am the only nerd across multiple generations. My nephew is a Hikikomori and not traveling to see me. I’d rather have a real system that connects to the network and fills the need for accurate weather in my town.
Look at a weather map with animated radar overlay. You will often see precipitation approaching and can predict how soon based on its speed and heading.
That’s what I already do. Which got me thinking about why apps are so bad at this considering they can do the same thing.
MyRadar is scary good, in my experience.
Since people are sharing their weather apps, I use Breezy Weather! Multiple sources, lots of info, FOSS, what’s not to like. I tried multiple sources untill I found one that was the most accurate for me.
For one thing, there’s two competing weather services providing the data to countless apps in the US and one of them has more money to throw around than the other.
The weather channel has better weather predictions overall than Apple’s own weather app, as rated by Forecastadvisor.com, but is not as accurate as Accuweather is although it’s used in more apps.
Weather is about tracking and predictions. It’s never going to be completely 100% correct. But taking a hodgepodge of information from several prediction services means you’re more likely to be less accurate overall despite what people may think.
Which are the two? NOAA and what else?
NOAA is one, the US armed Forces is the other. Not including info provided from other weather agencies outside the US.
Weather Underground allows you to filter down to your zip code. Not accurate down to your exact vicinity, but better than the weather forecast for your entire city.
NOAA sources are usually good in the US, weather.gov for a quick map and search by zip code or city, but they follow the same % system mentioned as most do
The couple apps/widgets I’ve tried haven’t been good for working with VPN unless I want to know the weather halfway around the world.
Some airports are still reporting temps once an hour, so the info you get from an app can be old and irrelevant. Also some apps use a forecast made days before, they are too cheap/busy to update it.
Because we have tons of ground-level sensors, but not a lot in the upper layers of the atmosphere, I think?
Why is this important? Weather processes are usually modelled as a set of differential equations, and you want to know the border conditions in order to solve them and obtain the state of the entire atmosphere. The atmosphere has two boundaries: the lower, which is the planet’s surface, and the upper, which is where the atmosphere ends. And since we don’t seem to have a lot of data from the upper layers, it reduces the quality of all predictions.
I use MyRadar for everything. Have for years. https://apps.apple.com/app/id322439990
I notice the rain predictions are quite a bit more accurate in the cooler months. You can see a weather front traveling west to east as it comes across the country (I’m in US) and rains can last all day. During the hotter parts in summer rain clouds appear out of nowhere usually in the afternoon and rains are heavy but brief. This happened here in NE Ohio just an hour ago. There was no forecast for rain that I was aware of but suddenly we got doused for twenty minutes.
