Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather?
Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather?
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.
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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.
Key word “in the given forecast area”.
The statement “there’s a 40% chance of rain at any given point at any given time in the forecast area/period” is an average over both area and time.
Many different actual distributions of rain could result in that average, including a 100% chance of it raining 100% of the time in 40% of the are or a 40% chance of it raining in 100% of the time in 100% of the area, and a 100% chance of it raining 40% of the time in 100% of the area. Real distributions are typically messier than that.
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!
I think you just restated their joke.
yeah, never mind the references in the article where they pointed out the evidence for their conclusions. :P
It's that for the broadcast area, about half is gonna get rain.
Isn't that virtually the same thing as a 50% chance of rain at my position though?
Yeah...
And it wants a definitive answer for the exact location they're standing in...
Which isn't possible
Yeah, kind of. It's going to rain. That's the forecast. That rain will effect half of the area in their forecast range.
That's not how that works
No, because clouds—and weather patterns in general—are not necessarily uniform across an area.
No it doesn't, it means that under those conditions, about 50% of the times it has rained in that area