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It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will sho

It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.

gonzalohm 19d ago
Same experience. I moved to Windy and I just look at the weather radar and make my own prediction. I guesstimate that it has less than 50% accuracy for my area
timmg 19d ago
Same experience. As a former Googler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is an integration that is "planned" -- but just not done yet. And some good handful of people are planning to wring a promo out of work. "Implemented weather UI in Android that is 63% more accurate." ;)
MPSimmons 18d ago
Weather 2 doesn't seem to have been an ensemble model. Weather 3 is, so theoretically it can get more accurate outcomes by taking the probabilistic analysis of several models concurrently to determine the most likely weather conditions. I'm building a tool right now that uses an ensemble to determine wind gust likelihood, which is useful for safety critical work on construction sites and the like.
- counters 18d ago
  WeatherNext 2 was based on the FGN architecture described in [1]. It was explicitly designed and trained to produce ensemble forecasts (it was trained in such a way that the output ensemble optimized a CRPS metrics). In fact, it was a set of 4 different model weights, each of which was seeded with a random noise vector to produce an array of 16 forecasts for a total of 64 ensemble members. WeatherNext 3 trimmed that down from 4 to 2 separate model weights to use. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w
  - MPSimmons 18d ago
    Awesome comment, thanks for the info!
phoghed 18d ago
I see the same sentiment any time any weather app is posted. Especially when Dark Sky comes up
exhilaration 18d ago
The Google daily and hourly forecasts aren't great, but the weather map forecast is excellent. Where does that come from? What's generating the predicted movement of the storm clouds?
- firesteelrain 18d ago
  Nexrad? NOAA?
- counters 18d ago
  It's their two weather models, WeatherNext and MetNet.
rtpg 18d ago
This isn't a super serious comment (and an opportunity for someone to speak up on this) but... I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?) I remember being _very_ impressed like 15 years ago about how I would have _hourly_ weather forecasts (in particular around the rain) that seemed like magic! And then things... seemed to slowly get worse (at least in Tokyo) a couple years ago I was chatting with a friend in Kyoto. They used to live in Tokyo and had made the _exactly_ aligned comment like: "I was used to the rain forecasts being not so accurate anymore. After moving to Kyoto they seemed to be quite good! And now they're also bad here. Am I cursed?" I looked at some 5G rollout maps and you could see Kyoto rollout happened a bit around the time frame they were complaining about.... Anyways I think for most people (at least for myself) weather forecasting seems like this odd dark magic that can't work at all, but there was a window in which it _felt_ like it was super accurate. At least in my personal experience
- counters 18d ago
  > I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?) The short version of the "spectrum" issue is that 5G is being allocated in bands very close to the microwave spectra where atmospheric water vapor emits. A bevy of public and commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit passively monitor these microwave spectra and produce extremely important information that is assimilated into numerical weather models. The federal government sets limits on "out-of-band emissions" for operators emitting in the allocated 5G spectra. These emissions can bleed over into the microwave water vapor bands, creating noise that masks the natural presence of water vapor. The limits for this out-of-band emission is on the order of ~10-20 dB, and there's some work in the atmospheric science literature suggesting that this is enough to confound certain water vapor retrievals. That basically means we lose these observations that help constrain the forecast. There isn't much indication that this is a serious issue in day-to-day meteorology at the moment. But it's an issue which will be significantly more difficult to unroll and claw back than to simply protect key spectra in the first place.
- lkois 18d ago
notatoad 18d ago
does google actually use their own models in consumer products? i'm not an android user, but the weather widget in the google search results for my area always seems to be attributed to weather.com.
- hellon3wheels 18d ago
  The "Google Weather" Android app links to a page that says >The Google Weather forecast is created from an internal forecasting system that utilizes weather models and observations from global weather agencies. It also lists the data sources it uses, but is vague about what model(s) it feeds the source data into. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13687874 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13687874
clumsysmurf 18d ago
Same here, if its raining Windy.com radar will always show it, but often Google Weather does not show it, despite saying its updated "now". Sometimes it seems to be a tiling issue, where there will be a blob of rain on the map but cut off at some boundary over the forecast area.
thedub 18d ago
At one point they did release the most accurate weather model by far, but it actually decreased usage compared to showing a weather forecast more skewed towards "happy" temperatures and weather. I'm certain this is still the case and likely explains why you are seeing a more positive (no rain) version of the weather.
jedberg 18d ago
It's because the current administration cut NOAAs funding, which means fewer weather balloons, which means less data to make a prediction. And it means less real time updates. So yeah, when it rains, it might take a few hours for that to flow into your weather app. It's a direct result of DOGE.
- franticgecko3 18d ago
  >and every other app I check shows it. Other apps have a different government?
  - jedberg 18d ago
    That person is probably misremembering or looking later after the update. I pull weather data from multiple apps all the time because I’m a weather nerd and they all agree equally poorly.
    - jvanderbot 18d ago
      My work involves parsing real-time weather data at an existential level - because our entire use case is built around providing weather-related alerts and re-routes for aircraft. The accuracy of weather data has been largely unaffected since DOGE took hold. The reliability of the infra, however, has suffered somewhat. There are more outages now than there ever were, with a massive spike in outages, not kidding, the month DOGE was at its peak. At that time we even saw significant manifest changes - stupid stuff like clearly LLM-generated json fields that were whole sentences instead of the key/value pairs from the schema. It was a wild time. Anyway downstream we're mostly fine nowadays. I can still follow storm tracks accurately, see real time responses, correlate with pilot reports and lightning strikes, compare with aircraft telemetry mostly favorably, etc etc. It's quite remarkable what high-end weather products are able to do, the ones you have to work for. We do, however, merge several free/paid sources into one picture. Rarely do I find serious disagreement, but it does happen.
      - 2PqboPPmKegvanx 18d ago

gonzalohm 19d ago

Same experience. I moved to Windy and I just look at the weather radar and make my own prediction. I guesstimate that it has less than 50% accuracy for my area

timmg 19d ago

Same experience. As a former Googler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is an integration that is "planned" -- but just not done yet. And some good handful of people are planning to wring a promo out of work. "Implemented weather UI in Android that is 63% more accurate." ;)

MPSimmons 18d ago

Weather 2 doesn't seem to have been an ensemble model. Weather 3 is, so theoretically it can get more accurate outcomes by taking the probabilistic analysis of several models concurrently to determine the most likely weather conditions. I'm building a tool right now that uses an ensemble to determine wind gust likelihood, which is useful for safety critical work on construction sites and the like.

counters 18d ago
WeatherNext 2 was based on the FGN architecture described in [1]. It was explicitly designed and trained to produce ensemble forecasts (it was trained in such a way that the output ensemble optimized a CRPS metrics). In fact, it was a set of 4 different model weights, each of which was seeded with a random noise vector to produce an array of 16 forecasts for a total of 64 ensemble members. WeatherNext 3 trimmed that down from 4 to 2 separate model weights to use. [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w
- MPSimmons 18d ago
  Awesome comment, thanks for the info!

phoghed 18d ago

I see the same sentiment any time any weather app is posted. Especially when Dark Sky comes up

exhilaration 18d ago

The Google daily and hourly forecasts aren't great, but the weather map forecast is excellent. Where does that come from? What's generating the predicted movement of the storm clouds?

firesteelrain 18d ago
Nexrad? NOAA?
counters 18d ago
It's their two weather models, WeatherNext and MetNet.

rtpg 18d ago

This isn't a super serious comment (and an opportunity for someone to speak up on this) but... I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?) I remember being _very_ impressed like 15 years ago about how I would have _hourly_ weather forecasts (in particular around the rain) that seemed like magic! And then things... seemed to slowly get worse (at least in Tokyo) a couple years ago I was chatting with a friend in Kyoto. They used to live in Tokyo and had made the _exactly_ aligned comment like: "I was used to the rain forecasts being not so accurate anymore. After moving to Kyoto they seemed to be quite good! And now they're also bad here. Am I cursed?" I looked at some 5G rollout maps and you could see Kyoto rollout happened a bit around the time frame they were complaining about.... Anyways I think for most people (at least for myself) weather forecasting seems like this odd dark magic that can't work at all, but there was a window in which it _felt_ like it was super accurate. At least in my personal experience

counters 18d ago
> I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?) The short version of the "spectrum" issue is that 5G is being allocated in bands very close to the microwave spectra where atmospheric water vapor emits. A bevy of public and commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit passively monitor these microwave spectra and produce extremely important information that is assimilated into numerical weather models. The federal government sets limits on "out-of-band emissions" for operators emitting in the allocated 5G spectra. These emissions can bleed over into the microwave water vapor bands, creating noise that masks the natural presence of water vapor. The limits for this out-of-band emission is on the order of ~10-20 dB, and there's some work in the atmospheric science literature suggesting that this is enough to confound certain water vapor retrievals. That basically means we lose these observations that help constrain the forecast. There isn't much indication that this is a serious issue in day-to-day meteorology at the moment. But it's an issue which will be significantly more difficult to unroll and claw back than to simply protect key spectra in the first place.
lkois 18d ago

notatoad 18d ago

does google actually use their own models in consumer products? i'm not an android user, but the weather widget in the google search results for my area always seems to be attributed to weather.com.

hellon3wheels 18d ago
The "Google Weather" Android app links to a page that says >The Google Weather forecast is created from an internal forecasting system that utilizes weather models and observations from global weather agencies. It also lists the data sources it uses, but is vague about what model(s) it feeds the source data into. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13687874 https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13687874

clumsysmurf 18d ago

Same here, if its raining Windy.com radar will always show it, but often Google Weather does not show it, despite saying its updated "now". Sometimes it seems to be a tiling issue, where there will be a blob of rain on the map but cut off at some boundary over the forecast area.

thedub 18d ago

At one point they did release the most accurate weather model by far, but it actually decreased usage compared to showing a weather forecast more skewed towards "happy" temperatures and weather. I'm certain this is still the case and likely explains why you are seeing a more positive (no rain) version of the weather.

jedberg 18d ago

It's because the current administration cut NOAAs funding, which means fewer weather balloons, which means less data to make a prediction. And it means less real time updates. So yeah, when it rains, it might take a few hours for that to flow into your weather app. It's a direct result of DOGE.

franticgecko3 18d ago
>and every other app I check shows it. Other apps have a different government?
- jedberg 18d ago
  That person is probably misremembering or looking later after the update. I pull weather data from multiple apps all the time because I’m a weather nerd and they all agree equally poorly.
  - jvanderbot 18d ago
    My work involves parsing real-time weather data at an existential level - because our entire use case is built around providing weather-related alerts and re-routes for aircraft. The accuracy of weather data has been largely unaffected since DOGE took hold. The reliability of the infra, however, has suffered somewhat. There are more outages now than there ever were, with a massive spike in outages, not kidding, the month DOGE was at its peak. At that time we even saw significant manifest changes - stupid stuff like clearly LLM-generated json fields that were whole sentences instead of the key/value pairs from the schema. It was a wild time. Anyway downstream we're mostly fine nowadays. I can still follow storm tracks accurately, see real time responses, correlate with pilot reports and lightning strikes, compare with aircraft telemetry mostly favorably, etc etc. It's quite remarkable what high-end weather products are able to do, the ones you have to work for. We do, however, merge several free/paid sources into one picture. Rarely do I find serious disagreement, but it does happen.
    - 2PqboPPmKegvanx 18d ago