Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather?
Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather?
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.
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Weather apps don't do real time analytics, but show you the forecast some nearby weather station has calculated. Whether that's based on current data or a couple hours ago depends on the exact provider they use. And hardly anyone of those are done by actual humans, it's aggregated statistics.
If you look at precipitation maps, you are doing that forecast by yourself based on cloud movements and local knowledge, something no machine-generated forecast can do as good.
Plus, there's usually one weather station covering a large area, so hyperaccurate predictions would have to be made just for you - which simply costs to much.
Nearby is so highly dependent on where exactly those are located, and what they're connected to (some are handled by local volunteers that have hardware that reports periodically as opposed to being operated by an agency directly). Various apps don't all connect to the same data sources.
Official reporting locations may not actually be close to you and weather can be highly localized. A mile can make a massive difference in weather in some regions, and the official recording location for the city is 10 miles away.
Even very close data stations are limited. I regularly get incorrect rainstorm notifications from data gathered from a couple miles away.
Sma here. I have a buddy that's a half mile away and we regularly don't have the same rain. It'll be pouring here and dry as a bone there.
I once experienced a storm where, for a very brief time, my front yard was experiencing a torrential downpour and my back yard was dry as a bone.
My house was not that big - maybe 1700-1800sq ft - and our lot size was less than a quarter acre. Blew my mind. (Obviously storms have edges. It was still weird.)
I had family from out of town calling me once because the nstional news was reporting the entire area was hit with heavy storms and tornados. The city isn't even more then 15 minutes down the interstate, but we didn't get a single drop of rain.
Sounds like the system is just stuck on old tech. If I can tell that rain will reach my area from a precipitation radar map then I’m fairly certain an ML based system can do this too.
I suppose there’s just no money in it.