4 ms·
I like windy but the radar is problematic, areas of blue typically are seeing no rainfall hitting the ground. I feel like the radar view is overstating the weat
by hnburnsy 3y ago
I like windy but the radar is problematic, areas of blue typically are seeing no rainfall hitting the ground. I feel like the radar view is overstating the weather to look more impressive.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoNational weather radar is difficult to interpret. It isn't showing what people intuit it is showing, the relationship between that picture and what is going on outside is complicated. To make it even more complicated, weather radars switch modes depending on the weather conditions in their area of coverage which causes the underlying phenomenon they are measuring to change, so it isn't even consistent in that sense. The underlying metadata captures the operating radar mode but most people will have no idea what to do with that information. And then there is the fact that weather radar captures a lot of phenomena that are not "weather".
- hnburnsy 3y agoThanks for that explanation but windy consistently seems overstating rainfall.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoMost rain never reaches the ground and the radar is measuring rain that is very far above ground level, so it generates false positives. Reliable at-ground-level rain measurement has to come from other sources, like automotive sensors, ground weather stations, RF propagation measurements in mobile networks, etc. The downside is that these often have much less coverage than the radar.