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Weather forecasts have become more accurate
- belorn 3y agoI wonder if energy market speculation is playing a role in making weather forecasts more accurate. I would not be surprised if some stock markets also get influenced by weather, especially during periods of high fluctuations in energy costs.
- okdood64 3y agoAnecdotally, they have been very frustrating in the Bay Area with this El Niño rain season. Not as reliable. Many ruined plans, but I have learnt my lesson.
- bcardarella 3y agoNot in Boston, they've become far far worse. I presume because of climate change but still has become frustrating in recent years.
- ejb999 3y agowhy would you think that short term weather forecasts are somehow affected by climate change?
- Y-bar 3y agoI don't think OP i correct that the forecasts there are less reliable, but I would gather that: More warming == more energy in the system. More energy in the system -> more volatile weather. More volatile weather -> harder to predict weather.
- dingnuts 3y agoYou gotta keep up with the narrative bud, it's not "weather isn't climate" anymore; as long as the weather seems unusual to adults, it's evidence of climate change. But don't forget! That doesn't mean nice weather is counter-evidence of climate change. Nice weather is /also/ evidence of climate change, because it's merely the lull before the weird weather. Got it yet?
- bcardarella 3y ago[flagged]
- bcardarella 3y agoClimate models are based upon historical data. Recent climate change has changed weather patterns where historical data being used is making predictions less reliable.
- counters 3y agoNo, climate models are the same sorts of physics-based simulations as weather models.
- hiddencost 3y ago[flagged]
- hackerlight 3y agoIsn't GraphCast now state of the art for weather forecasting? It outperforms physics-based simulations over the relevant time horizon.
- counters 3y ago"Outperforms" is a stretch; its skill is on par or slightly exceeds the state-of-the-art NWP models currently run today, but you as an end user would not notice the difference between GraphCast and the ECMWF HRES. Furthermore, raw model guidance is almost always passed through a blending and statistical post-processing process alongside competitor models to fine tune the forecast, and there are no rigorous benchmarks of whether or not the inclusion of GraphCast improves this process because very few groups are running it operationally. Also, it's worth noting that GraphCast's outputs are a tiny subset of what we would traditionally forecast as weather parameters. You can't out-perform a competitor on a task that you aren't solving!
- Zamiel_Snawley 3y agoWhich forecasts have become worse in Boston? 24 hour, 5 day, all of the above? This is surprising to me, because even when traveling across the USA, I've found the predictions to be very useful.
- bcardarella 3y agoAll forecasts. I race sailboat around Boston and they've been absolutely horrible. Not just for extreme weather events but even regular weather wind direction is off by nearly 180 degrees in direction regularly, wind strength is regularly wrong too. The predictions overemphasize rain events in the 10 day forecast during the Summer that nearly always completely go away and they fail to predict rain and lightning events. That's overing multiple weather models at various resolutions.
- jghn 3y ago> they've become far far worse Where are your data to back this claim up? And over what time horizon?
- Zamiel_Snawley 3y agoThis article mostly discusses longer-term forecasts, but I have also been impressed with the quality and reliability of imminent-storm alerts. They have saved me from getting drenched in a rain storm or allowed me to pull off the road for a break before a downpour. It doesn't get a ton of press, but as this article highlights, progress has been steady and significant. This article asserts that improving forecasts in low-income countries is underrated--does anyone know of studies that predict the impact better forecasts would have? Helping the poor with tech seems like the kind of project that many philanthropists could get excited about, and hopefully more effective than gravity lights and the like.
- macintux 3y agoAs someone who drives much of the summer with no top on his Jeep, Dark Sky was a revelation. I also managed to find a route between two bands of heavy thunderstorms (with a tornado watch to boot) one night far from home with no top and no doors using the radar. Modern technology is amazing.
- darknavi 3y ago> Dark Sky was a revelation Any replacement for it on iOS? Maybe I am crazy but Apple's weather alerts just don't seem like the same sauce.
- Larrikin 3y agoI think they were doing some magic with the Android phone sensors, large amounts of user reports, as well as the actual forecast models. Before Apple bought them, my Android phone was its own party trick at the bar. I'd be able to tell people down to the minute when it would start and stop raining. It was amazing for bar hopping on bad weather days.
- counters 3y agoNope. Simple computer vision / optical flow applied to radar image sequences.
- redavni 3y agoThere is a gap between the title of the article and the contents. Starts out with weather forecasting is improved, but spends most of the article talking about how poor people and countries have other things to spend their money on than forecasting weather.
- pornel 3y agoThey also spend more on forecasts as a share of GDP. It's a pretty bleak picture — it's a bigger cost for them, and they still get worse results.
- throw0101d 3y agoRecommend the book The Weather Machine by Andrew Blume (also wrote Tubes) on some history of forecasting and what happens in the background nowadays: > In The Weather Machine, Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey through an everyday miracle. In a quest to understand how the forecast works, he visits old weather stations and watches new satellites blast off. He follows the dogged efforts of scientists to create a supercomputer model of the atmosphere and traces the surprising history of the algorithms that power their work. He discovers that we have quietly entered a golden age of meteorology—our tools allow us to predict weather more accurately than ever, and yet we haven’t learned to trust them, nor can we guarantee the fragile international alliances that allow our modern weather machine to exist. * https://www.andrewblum.net/the-weather-machine-2 https://www.andrewblum.net/the-weather-machine-2 * https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42079139 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42079139 For the very early history of meteorology, see perhaps The Invention of Clouds about Luke Howard: * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1148768.The_Invention_of_Clouds https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1148768.The_Invention_of... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Howard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Howard
- LgWoodenBadger 3y agoMaybe coincidentally related that Simpson's paradox article from earlier, but if they've gotten more accurate overall, I certainly do not see it in the 24-hour forecasts. Of course, I'm also probably only paying attention to when it's wrong, not when it's right. I plan my motorcycling based on rain, and the number of times I've gotten caught in rain when it wasn't supposed to rain at all that day is non-zero just this year.
- VHRanger 3y agoDaily reminder that data isn't the multiple of anecdote.
- Izkata 3y agoExcept it literally is. That statement is pretty much only used as a thought-terminating cliche that means "you're not allowed to have an opinion".
- not2b 3y agoNo, it literally isn't, at least, the plural of anecdotes isn't useful data. To be useful, data need to be collected in a uniform and systematic way. Anecdotes are memory, and it seems we are wired to remember the unusual and the unexpected. So you remember wrong forecasts (especially if you were caught outside unprepared), don't remember correct forecasts. Collecting everyone's anecdotes would not give you any insight about how good or how bad forecasts are. Pointing this out is not an attempt to silence you.
- dataflow 3y agoI'm sure they have, but I've also been drenched while reading a weather report that refused to admit it was raining in my city right now. It just told me it was cloudy, despite clear and rather heavy rain for 30+ mins straight over the whole city. To this day I haven't figured out how that's even possible.
- n_plus_1_acc 3y agoDepending in which sources they used, they simply interpolate on a very rough grid
- dataflow 3y agoI mean, I guess, but how rough of a grid are we talking? This wasn't a tiny city or something... it was a pretty populated city spanning a few miles across in a very populated and well known region. Granted I didn't walk around to check the whole city for rain, but the sky didn't make it look like the clouds were only above my head...
- InSteady 3y agomicrobursts are a thing. It's entirely possible much of your city was dry despite the cloud cover. Also possible they just done goofed.
- n_plus_1_acc 3y agoO heard it can be as mich as 50 miles if they cheapskate hard
- NordSteve 3y agoOne factor is your distance from the nearest weather radar, and nearest airport with automated weather observation. This sort of prediction is heavily dependent on whether the precip is detected by sensing. I've seen similar things in our area (Minnesota) where you drive through a snowstorm, but the radar shows nothing in theare.
- jrockway 3y agoPeople seem to have different opinions on how good forecasts are. I think it likely depends on which model your forecast source of choice pulls from. I notice that the weather on my Apple Watch corresponds exactly to what GFS says. GFS is OK for medium range, but I don't find it too useful for shorter range. NAM is better for a day or two out. HRRR is better for a few hours out. Rather than letting some aggregator simplify the weather for you, you can just look at the raw data yourself: https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ For big events, the media briefings by the National Weather Service are good resources. But they often stop the briefings early; a few weeks ago we had a high probability of a large amount of snowfall. The updates stopped at like 9AM, the snow was forecast to start around 1PM. Watching the short term models showed that the probability for snow was decreasing (NYC was just below the snow/rain line), and indeed we got pretty much no snow. (It snowed, but it didn't accumulate and the change to rain happened early.) To be fair, the briefing from the weather service said that the changeover time between snow and rain was very uncertain and that it would be the difference between a little rain and major snow event. But my point is, you can always go get yourself some more data; the closer you get to the event, the more accurate the forecast is. (I don't know if any of you watch Skip Talbot, but he was looking at helicity swaths on the HRRR a few hours out, found a big one, and where HRRR predicted the strong rotation in the storm is pretty much exactly the path of a major tornado. HRRR is never going to be perfect, but it is right a lot.)
- rootusrootus 3y agoThat's an interesting point about the Apple weather forecast. That correlates pretty well with my experience. It is exceptionally inaccurate at short range forecasts. It's kind of a running joke at this point.
- herpdyderp 3y agoThe most humorous part to me is when it says it's currently raining or snowing and it's clear and sunny. How can a system be so wrong that it can't tell the current state of the weather?
- elil17 3y agoLike many other people are commenting, I have subjectively felt that rain forecasts have gotten worse. I can think of two theories that could explain this. I'd be curious to hear from someone more knowledgeable if any of them are right or plausible. 1. High frequency 5G has thrown off rain forecasts in urban areas. Average prediction accuracy has still improved because rural/suburban areas don't have high frequency 5G. 2. The weather app now shows rain forecasts in time blocks as small as 15 minutes, even though predictions this granular are still inaccurate. This has inflated our expectations for forecast accuracy.
- Zamiel_Snawley 3y agoHow does mm wave 5G effect forecasts? Interfering with weather radar?
- elil17 3y ago23.8-gigahertz 5G signals can look like water vapor to the instruments on weather satellites.
- SiempreViernes 3y agoI would guess it is mostly down to option 2, coupled with the fact that aspects such as precipitation onset are possibly not something that actually has improved much: the examples given are hurricane tracks and atmospheric pressure which don't obviously couple tightly to when it starts raining.
- cogman10 3y agoAn area has to be extremely densly trafficked before high frequency 5G is deployed. And even then, the whole point is to minimize broadcast range to avoid interference. Further, it's only the upper range of high frequency spectrum that's being used (not sure who owns it) so it's not even every carrier that could interfere. Finally, the most powerful radars are transmitting in the kilowatts range of output. It's hard for me to imagine that the microwatt output of cellphones are often the cause of radar interference.
- jerf 3y ago
- goatkey 3y agoAnyone who lives in a hurricane-prone area like myself (Florida) knows that while forecasts have gotten a _lot_ better, there is still so much room for improvement. I am not affiliated, but I recommend checking out https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ to see what forecasts are best for your city. I totally changed weather providers and it seems much better now. 'The Secret World of Weather: How to Read Signs in Every Cloud, Breeze, Hill, Street, Plant, Animal, and Dewdrop' by Gooley is a fun read for anyone interested in figuring out weather without a forecast (or to supplement).
- AceyMan 3y agoObligatory citation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock
- jrockway 3y agoIt also keeps tigers away. I don't see any tigers around there, anyway.
- artdigital 3y agoSadly something like this doesn't exist internationally from what I can tell. I live in Japan and have no idea which sources are good and which are bad. The local apps pull data from the Japan Meteorological Agency, so does Apple Weather, and so does Carrot Weather since a recent update (though those 2 still give me different results). Outside of Japan, when I travel, I have no idea so I just leave the Carrot Weather source on Apple Weather, because that at least pulls data from local weather services if available (https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/data-source-attribution/ https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/data-source-attributi...)
- Alifatisk 3y ago> I am not affiliated, but I recommend checking out https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ https://www.forecastadvisor.com/ to see what forecasts are best for your city. What a great recommendation, it’s sadly US only. I have previously used an app called Climendo which claimed to digest over 15k forecasts and use the most accurate one in my city.
- paxys 3y agoAll the stuff mentioned in the article is accurate – better raw data, faster computers, smaller grids, better predictive algorithms etc. all result in vastly better weather info in general today. This also means though that you have to put in more effort to get a better result for yourself. What algorithm is the app using? Does it localize all the way to your neighborhood, or your street? How frequently does it update? Is your GPS accurate? People generally don't think about this stuff, but some fine tuning can result in vastly better results.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoOne thing I came to appreciate about growing up on the east coast was how much more accurate the forecasts were than they are in Southern California. The winds pushing east, the expansive radar coverage over USA that's publicly available, and the commercial airlines collecting weather data means the storms and weather systems are well understood as they're coming over. Plus the storms make nice straight lines from north to south that push through. In Southern California the rain forecasts always seem off. Even right now, it's raining and the forecast told me it was just supposed to be a little cloudy.
- timetraveller26 3y agookay, nice, but what about software delivery forecasts?
- callalex 3y agoDark Sky brought a lot of this powerful forecasting to a hyper-local level. It’s such a shame that Apple bought it up and just…threw it all away. What a waste.
- counters 3y agoDark Sky didn't have "powerful forecasting." They literally just had a simple computer vision app which used optical flow to track blobs and weather radar, and then they extrapolated those blobs forward.
- brewdad 3y agoIt was a tool that was either very accurate or inaccurate depending on your perspective. If DS said rain would be starting in 8 minutes, it almost always rained at my house very soon thereafter. Very accurate. However, sometimes that rain came 4 minutes later or perhaps 12 minutes later. Now the forecast was off by a factor of 50%. Could be no big deal or a thing that ruins your morning depending on whether you got caught out in it and expected to by dry or not.
- counters 3y agoWell, tracking a rain blob on radar that is 8 minutes from your house is an extraordinarily linear problem, so not surprising they'd have absurdly high P/R for that forecast :)
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIf by "threw it all away" you mean "integrated into the built-in weather app on every Apple platform" then, sure. I guess.
- jdminhbg 3y agoApple even opened it up as an API that's cheaper than lots of the others! I don't know where people get this idea that DS died, it's like they just took what happens to lots of other startup acquisitions and extrapolate it like it's a blob of precipitation moving towards their current location.
- glitchinc 3y agoI could not disagree more. I paid far less attention to weather forecasts 30 years ago than I do now, but I have numerous anecdotal examples of how weather forecasting models and information provided by publicly available weather services have trended towards uselessness. There is no publicly accessible weather information service that can accurately forecast weather at my house. One of the first purchases I made when I moved in to the house was an Ambient Weather Station resulting from pure curiosity that has evolved into an interest in keeping a historical record of "actual weather". Daily hi/low temperatures generally have positive correlation with forecasted temperatures, but the spread between forecasted temperatures and actual temperatures is generally ten degrees less than forecasted. Long term qualitative temperature trends ("above average for the winter" and similar) are positively correlated. But ... - Forecasted storm intensities are wildly inaccurate. Forecasted high-intensity rain storms end up being all-day drizzle events or on and off rain showers, and visa versa. A forecast of “a passing afternoon shower” ends up being an all-day wash-out. - Precipitation forecasts are wildly inaccurate, without correlation. Actual precipitation can be far less than forecasted or far more than forecasted, even when compared to short term forecasts--to include same day and intrahour forecasts. Just this past weekend we had accumulating whiteout snow squalls on an off all day long on Sunday, yet there was never any mention of any possibility of snow by any local meteorologists or by any weather forecasting service I routinely check. Dark Sky was the best app I ever used for weather forecasting. Its short and long term forecasts were more than sufficient for planning purposes, but where the app to this day has had no equal was in its intrahour local forecasts and precipitation forecasts. If Dark Sky alerted me that there was going to be tornado in my area within the next 15 minutes, I saw a funnel cloud 15 minutes later. If Dark Sky alerted me that it was going to stop snowing in 15 minutes, the snow stopped 15 minutes later. Sadly, Apple lobotomized the service when they claimed to have integrated Dark Sky functionality in to Apple Weather. Even though I fairly regularly report weather accuracy issues to Apple via the Weather app, the reporting and forecasting provided by Apple Weather has never improved. - Seasonal precipitation forecasts are wildly inaccurate without correlation. Modeling (from NOAA, local meteorologists, etc.) suggested we were to have "above average snowfall" this winter, with the official average winter snowfall being 48 inches. We have received 20 inches so far this winter. Either winter will go out with a bang in the next few weeks (which would be nice, IMO), or modeling will have predicted more than 140% of the actual snowfall. This is an altogether unfair comparison, but why not: if the executives of a publicly traded company forecasted 140% more revenue to shareholders than the company they preside over realized, they would all be immediately fired, sued, jailed, etc. If society collectively will not tolerate 140% inaccuracy in financial matters (stock price manipulation, value destruction, and so forth), should we be content with weather forecasting and modeling that is just as inaccurate? After all, weather is treated as (only) a financial matter by insurance companies. On an individual level, viewing weather's impact through financial optics still makes sense--from lost days of work and lost wages, to insurance premiums, to food prices, to transportation costs, to taxes, to paying for the ability to get your money back for a concert ticket you bought months ago if the weather is too bad. Climate change is certainly wreaking havoc on weather modeling, but it has been doing so for a significant period of time and the models do not appear (to me) to be getting better at adequately accounting for the effects of climate change. If current weather forecasting models cannot be adapted to accurately account for the effects of climate change, it may be time to either fundamentally change the way weather modeling and forecasting is done, or not do it at all. Taking out my broad brush and bucket of paint: are there any companies relying on AI to develop a more accurate weather forecasting service? And if anyone has a weather service to recommend that will not “Night at the Roxbury” me with ads and that has accurate 3-day-or-less weather forecasts, I am all ears. Please post them here.
- toolslive 3y agoBut it's still a chaotic system and Lyapunov would claim we're quite vain to even try.
- Workaccount2 3y agoKeep in mind, weather forecasting is something that is exceedingly difficult and that concerns just about everyone. That means it is particularly ripe for confirmation bias. We objectively know that weather forecasts are more accurate than ever. We subjectively know that they are bad/gotten worse, because last Thursday I brought my umbrella to work for nothing.
- vanilla_nut 3y agoI find that 4 to 7 day forecasts tend to be 80% accurate. So probably a little bit better than they were when I was a kid. Unfortunately, the most important part of any forecast IMO is intensity. I don't care if we're going to get snow flurries all day, but if we're going to get a foot of snow, I would like to know -- and not just when the winter storm warning goes into effect! Similarly, I don't care if we're going to get scattered showers all day. But if we're going to get a downpour in the afternoon, I'd like to know so I can avoid getting caught in a flash flood on a trail or on the road. Same thing applies with temperature: if it's going to be cold all day, good to know. But if a rainstorm is going to remain active during a deep freeze and create a layer of ice on every exposed surface, I need to be prepared for walking, biking, or driving. Fortunately there's a somewhat local weather station near me that provides an RSS feed of longform weather forecasts. But I notice that more and more people wind up surprised by slightly-abnormal weather events as they rely more and more on smartphone weather apps. Weather apps that utterly lack the nuance that a paragraph of text can provide.
- mikeortman 3y agoThis speaks on long term outlooks at synoptic scale, we really should put some energy on researching mesoscale long term outlooks, or even 4 hour short term. It's a difficult problem to solve as the variables are quite complex, but the reward can be substantial -- on-land severe weather impacts less people but often is deadlier and can cause huge financial loss in areas that may not expect it.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- qwertox 3y agoI once listened to a podcast [0] with interviews of a couple of scientists at the ECMWF (European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). I think it was in that episode where one said that every 10 years we improve the forecast by 1 day. It was recorded in 2019, so AI wasn't really that much of a topic as it is today, considering that Google published an AI weather model in November of last year [1]. [0] https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/ https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-e... [1] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for...
- bilsbie 3y agoI can’t believe they killed dark sky. That was accurate to the minute. Incredible.
- jrmg 3y agoI remember reading in The Signal and The Noise* that people _think_ that forecasts are bad if it rains, but the chance of rain was reported as below 50%. Getting rain when the forecast told you there would probably not be rain is annoying; getting a sunny day when the forecast predicted likely rain is a pleasant surprise. To get what people judge to be a ‘good forecast’, the chance of rain has to be adjusted to be wildly too high - so that’s what consumer-focused forecasters do. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Signal_and_the_Noise
- HankB99 3y ago> the chance of rain was reported as below 50%. I've come to think of that as "it is going to rain 50% of the time. I don't know if that's what really is meant by "50% chance of rain," but it seems to fit. And overall I tend to believe that the forecast is astonishingly accurate. This is in the Midwest (Chicago market) where weather has to cross large portions of the country or Canada before it gets to us. I suppose there are areas on the coast where weather is more volatile and harder to predict.
- luplex 3y agoI think it means "for any given point in the specified area, and for any given point in time, p(rain)=50% So it of course won't rain for exactly 50% of the time on a given day, but over the long run, it will.
- bombcar 3y agoMy experience is that about 50% is where “rain will happen somewhere nearby, it may affect me”.
- nektro 3y ago"50% chance of rain" means that there's 100% chance of rain for 50% of the area
- kxrm 3y agoChance of rain is defined by NWS as: "The probability of precipitation (POP), is defined as the likelihood of occurrence (expressed as a percent) of a measurable amount of liquid precipitation (or the water equivalent of frozen precipitation) during a specified period of time at any given point in the forecast area. Measurable precipitation is equal to or greater than 0.01 inches. Unless specified otherwise, the time period is normally 12 hours. NWS forecasts use such categorical terms as occasional, intermittent, or periods of to describe a precipitation event that has a high probability of occurrence (80%+), but is expected to be of an "on and off" nature." Source: https://www.weather.gov/bgm/forecast_terms https://www.weather.gov/bgm/forecast_terms
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoTwelve year old won the San Jose Mercury News weather prediction contest one year, by predicting each day that the weather would be the same as the weather the day before. Consumer weather prediction isn't about being right. It's about pleasing the customer by appearing to be helpful. Which often means exaggerating the chances of abnormal weather, so if it happens you can be a hero. Real prediction is boring.
- hazbot 3y agoDepends, the "optimal" forecast can be very sensitive to the scoring metrics used. E.g. Darwin in Australia's tropics - persistence forecasting (as you describe above, just predicting the weather the day before) does very well on a metric like 'mean absolute error'. But has no practical skill at forecasting a severe tropical cyclone (aka hurricane/typhoon)! Many are willing to accept some level of false positives and a higher mean absolute error, because the cost of a surprise cyclone is so devestating.
- ImaCake 3y agoThis would work in San Jose because it’s a hot Mediterranean climate. Such climates have very predictable hot dry summers and cool wet winters. In Perth, similar climate, we often go month’s without rain in summer but will have several consecutive days of rain in winter. I imagine using the previous day would have a much lower skill score in more variable climes.
- TheCowboy 3y agoWas he competing against other humans vs weather models? I'd hesitate to draw a conclusion from this anecdote. I also couldn't find a link to this, and if you have one I'm interested in reading more.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoIt was back when I lived in San Jose, during the 1980's. It was in the paper. They had a contest every year, with amateurs trying to beat the weatherman.
- Vagantem 3y agoInteresting! As a contrast, I'm using historic weather data to predict future weather - couples use my free wedding weather predictor to find the perfect date for their wedding: https://dropory.com/ https://dropory.com/
- hazbot 3y agoCool! If you end up wanting to expand beyond just the nearest weather station (forgive me if I've misunderstood your process), you could look into ERA5 - free Numerical Weather Prediction 'reanalysis' of past weather on a regular grid. openmeteo has some open source tools for extracting time series data from it. But, although you get good spatial coverage, the drawback is 'the map is not the territory' - the model's representarion of reality doesn't perfectly mesh with the weather on the ground.
- Vagantem 3y agoVery cool - will check out!
- ufocia 3y agoA more catchy title would've been "Weather has become more predictable".
- egl2021 3y agoGeezer alert: forecasts look amazingly good to me. When I was a kid in the Pacific Northwest, it was routine to miss major storms until they hit land. We didn't have satellites, oceanic buoys, etc., and I remember the TV weather guy saying things like "we've had a report from a ship at sea..." and proceeding to make wild guesses.
- nvahalik 3y agoThis might be true for some areas but maybe not for others. Where we live is on the very edge of the NWS coverage. Our forecasts and messaging is generally a lot more “loose” than folks closer to the main NWS “office”. I am not sure if this has to do with radar capability but all the old time hams seem to corroborate this.
- cameronh90 3y agoThe weather forecasts in the UK are definitely much better than they were a decade ago, especially in the 3 to 14 day range. However, I still find my stupid heuristic works quite well for predicting tomorrow's weather: the weather tomorrow will be the same as what it was today. The UK often gets sticky ("blocking") weather patterns, so it works surprisingly well.
- TheCowboy 3y agoI took meteorology in high school and our teacher made us do a daily prediction exercise that I think would benefit all people, especially those who put too much weight into their own anecdata. We just had to make a prediction for the next day's weather. Then compare our prediction to the forecasted prediction. It didn't matter how accurate we were for the grade. Just that we systematically performed this exercise. It really made one appreciate the quality of forecasts, and that no, the "weather man" is not always wrong at all. A lot of huffing and puffing is from people who lack any rigor in their observations. And if you're trying to contest the accuracy of weather forecasts, or any form of forecasting really, then you really should provide some hard evidence.
- nipperkinfeet 3y agoEver since IBM destroyed TWC and Wunderground, things have become worse. Wunderground personal weather stations were the most accurate weather forecasts.
- hedora 3y agoThe Dark Sky (now Apple Weather) acquisition somehow went worse than those IBM ones. Not only is it less accurate than Dark Sky used to be, it’s somehow managed to be less accurate than pre-acquisition Apple Weather. https://weather.gov/ https://weather.gov/ still works (type your zip code into the box on the top left), thankfully. I’m worried weather.gov is only one election cycle away from being decommissioned. Lobbyists from commercial weather sites nearly got the US weather service killed under Trump. If/when they finally kill NOAA, global shipping will probably collapse, which is why killing it was blocked last time.
- open-meteo 3y agoCreator of the open-source weather API open-meteo.com here. The future of weather forecasting is likely to rely heavily on AI models. The article discusses Pangu Weather and HN comments mention GraphCast as examples. Interestingly, on the first of March, the European weather forecast center ECMWF released their new AI weather model AIFS as open data. This model is not only more accurate than their existing numerical model, but also requires significantly less computing power to run. They've published comparisons showing AIFS outperforms other models in terms of forecast precision: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/aifs-blog/2024/first-update-aifs https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/aifs-blog/2024/f...
- timthorn 3y agoRichard Turner gave an overview of AI weather forecasting to the Cambridge Philosophical Society at the end of last year. Recording available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGn18WH0d6s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGn18WH0d6s
- sklargh 3y agoJust a reminder that weather.gov’s local hourly forecast is exceptionally good and a masterclass in synthesizing information well. (weather.gov/“zip”)>go to right hand rail > hourly weather forecast. I haven’t found an app or tool outside of building a grafana dash that beats it.
- beanjuiceII 3y agoThe question is WHEN are they more accurate, my weather stations and apps tell me as weather changes what it is, which I can usually do too by stepping outside. But weather forecast (a prediction) I have not noticed it being more accurate and often wonder what changed, is it too much reliance on this real time data?
- fuzztester 3y agoWhat do people think of the forecasts on weather.com and of the Windy app? I use both, a bit, but I don't know much about weather science, so can't evaluate, except by comparing it with the real, for which both do seem to be at least somewhat accurate.