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.
I am a pilot and flight instructor. I took a full year of meteorology at ERAU. Most weather forecast products presented to the general public are completely worthless, and we really should run “AccuWeather” out of business.
The temperature number they show you for what it is “now” was probably taken by the AWOS at the closest municipal airport to your location. If you’ve ever noticed like a car GPS reporting weather from three towns over and not the one you’re in right now, it’s because the town you’re in right now doesn’t have a nearby airport or it doesn’t have an AWOS.
10-day forecasts are generated by tarot cards and have no basis in reality. Actual aviation weather forecasts seldom reach out beyond 24 hours.
Your best bet for getting a complete understanding of the weather is to start by looking at the GOES satellite imagery, ie actually look at the Earth from geosynchronous orbit and look at the clouds. You know those maps with the blue lines with triangles on them and red lines with half circles and big blue Hs and big red Ls? Those are called Prognostic charts, those map where high and low pressure systems and fronts are. Look at one of those and compare them to the satellite images. Then look at Doppler radar imagery, which shows where precipitation is. Look at what it’s been doing for the last few hours, and then you can get a good sense of generally what the weather is going to do in the next few hours. Beyond that, not even God knows because the prick hasn’t decided yet.
It amazes me how some people seem to go through life not realizing weather is fundamentally chaotic.
Like, even if all you do is look out a window from time to time…
Darksky could do it back in the day more or less. you’d get messages that it would rain in about 15 minutes and stop in the next 30.
Thing is, precep maps don’t work everywhere. You’re probably in a location like me where a thick front rolling through will almost always bring rain. If you get into warmer tropical climates, rainclouds will just poof out of nowhere and drop rain on your ass while other crazy fronts will pass over with nothing but some dark clouds.
Weather apps don’t do real time analytics, but show you the forecast some nearby weather station has calculated. Whether that’s based on current data or a couple hours ago depends on the exact provider they use. And hardly anyone of those are done by actual humans, it’s aggregated statistics.
If you look at precipitation maps, you are doing that forecast by yourself based on cloud movements and local knowledge, something no machine-generated forecast can do as good.
Plus, there’s usually one weather station covering a large area, so hyperaccurate predictions would have to be made just for you - which simply costs to much.
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?
Because they’ve never been able to do that…
When they say “50% chance of rain”, it doesn’t meant there’s a 50/50 chance it rains where you’re located
It’s that for the broadcast area, about half is gonna get rain.
Unless I misunderstood what you said, that’s not it either. 50% chance of rain means exactly that: according to their forecast models, there is a 50% change it will rain. Snopes did a writeup of this.
Can’t trust snopes any more
Says who? And what evidence?
Reading Snopes will give you plenty. Read the articles - and a lot of them use weasel-wording to push the result they want.
I don’t have the exact article on hand at the moment, but an example would be someone claiming that clear-cutting 1000 acres of trees would destroy [X]^3 of CO2 reduction; and then Snopes will “fact check” it by saying they aren’t cutting down 1000 acres of trees this year. Often times they’ll ‘debunk’ something that sounds like the claim, but isn’t the actual claim.
That’s not a correct understanding of how Snopes works. They debunked this.
We’ve investigated ourselves, and have found nothing wrong!
