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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 re
by jedberg 25d 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 25d ago>and every other app I check shows it. Other apps have a different government?
- jedberg 25d agoThat 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 25d agoMy 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 25d agoquestion for you but what weather app / tool are you using in your personal life, as someone who works in that general industry.
- jvanderbot 25d agoYou're gonna laugh, but... I ask alexa and it generally does fine. If uncertain I go outside for a bit and look at clouds. For the details, you just have to know how your local weather works - thunderstorms come in squall lines here, or are hot-day flash storms. Blizzards follow warm still weather the same way, but mostly in Jan-Mar, when the jet stream curls away and will snap back to bring arctic air down. Moisture (rain/slush potential) follows California rain by 2 days or so. If my friends in cali complain about rain, I know we're gonna have school closures if in the winter. If I really need to drill in on rain/snow chance, I google for a weather radar and do prediction in my own head. (windy.com is ok, accuweather is real data to watch). Storms generally move linearly or rotate, and gentle rain is wide while torrential rain is clustered. Locally, many of the old wives tales about the shape of clouds or direction of wind vs prevailing (with against, cross-grain) are true enough for 12h-24h predictions in upper midwest USA.
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- ehsankia 25d agoFrom my experience, it's quite hit and miss for every app. If you use Google 99% of the time and only check other apps when Google is wrong, then that's a biased experiments.
- counters 25d agoThere is little to no evidence that the current degradation of the US upper air backbone is regularly contributing to degraded forecast skill. That might change as we head into the more active northern hemisphere winter.
- jedberg 25d agoThere was a lot of evidence last winter. But with the active El Niño it’s starting earlier this year.
- counters 25d agoPlease share some of that evidence.
- __alexs 25d agoThat's because NOAA are not doing the tests that would produce such evidence.
- counters 25d agoThey are, as are plenty of folks in the community. I expect to see some good talks on this at the AMS Annual Meeting in January, based solely on my own peer network and what colleagues have mentioned they're working on.
- seanalltogether 25d agoI've stopped using google weather here in the UK as well because of how inaccurate its been over the past few years and have just fallen back on the BBC. Maybe its related, maybe not.
- roryirvine 25d agoYeah, the Met Office and BBC (which I believe use data from Meteo France) are both much more accurate for "later today" weather than Google for me in London. Google does update its forecast more frequently, and usually is as accurate as the others for the hour ahead. And the longer range 3+ day forecasts aren't noticeably worse either. It's just the intermediate 4 - 48 hour stuff that they're surprisingly terrible with, but that's exactly the time period I most care about in everyday use!
- jasoncartwright 25d agoSince last year the BBC is back using the Met Office https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm4z8mple3o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crm4z8mple3o
- maleldil 25d agoWhy do they show different information (temperature, rain etc.) for the same location?
- jasoncartwright 25d agoNo idea. I built something for this though https://metaweather.com https://metaweather.com
- maleldil 24d agoOooh, that is very useful. Thanks for sharing!
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- geertj 25d agoThis does pass the smell test. What is your evidence that DOGE has caused even one weather forecast to be less accurate?
- wallst07 25d agoI'm interested on how you drew the cause/effect of this, is there non-biased sources? Has google said as much, and how does this explain why some models are more accurate?
- testfrequency 25d agoHonestly, the iOS weather app is hyper accurate I’ve found in Europe in comparison to America… It really does come down to data source quality and access…that’s the crux of it.
- heckelson 24d agowhen it rains, it pours!