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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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.
All of those weather services just pull data from NOAA. There’s no competition, besides making up stuff beyond what NOAA predicts.
If all the private company weather services were only getting their info from the NOAA we wouldn't have such varying results most of the time. Which is basically my point. The results vary because they don't just use the NOAA's data and predictions. The second one is actually the US Armed Forces.
Their results vary because, like I said, they just make shit up. They have their own formulas using NOAA and other government data, but they’re still just making it up to look like they provide value so you’ll pay for their services. There’s other global weather models, like ECMWF, but they’re all government orgs. Windy has a great article on it. https://windy.app/blog/ecmwf-vs-gfs-differences-accuracy.html
If your app doesn’t tell you where it’s getting its data from then it’s using GFS from NOAA and it’s charging you for the free data it gets from there.
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.