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ab2c4

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Original poster
Sep 21, 2013
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2,077
North Carolina
I can understand a little when it’s wrong when predicting weather as the weather can change drastically without notice. However, when it reports info after the fact that is so wrong it makes you wonder.

Last night the Apple weather app reported that we got 2.2 inches of snow yesterday at my location. I went out in the yard and measured. We got 9 inches of snow lol.
 
I can understand a little when it’s wrong when predicting weather as the weather can change drastically without notice. However, when it reports info after the fact that is so wrong it makes you wonder.

Last night the Apple weather app reported that we got 2.2 inches of snow yesterday at my location. I went out in the yard and measured. We got 9 inches of snow lol.
Snow depth can significantly vary across small areas. Most official snow depth locations are located at airports. Other storm depths can come from trined NWS observers/spotters, law enforcement, traffic cams and automated weather systems.

Snow depth is will always be an issue with any app. It will be more accurate the closer you are to one of the above items I mentioned.

And I would recommend getting a few apps and see which one is more accurate. Also make sure you are getting NWS severe weather notifications.
 
Sometimes the app is predicting no rain for the whole day and when I look outside the window it is already raining since almost half an hour until the app changes to rain. Same for snow. There hasn't been any snow predicted for the next day and when I wake up after sleeping it has snowed.

It's also the other way round. There is a prediction of snow or rain on the current day and the next one and a few hours later it's gone. It's even worse with rain predictions, on a day where the percentage for rain was 100% it suddenly just disappeared on that same day.

I don't use location service but this doesn't matter if I put in the correct location myself. I can see what measuring station is used and it's very very near, also the next one what normally doesn't even differ, just sometimes a tiny bit.


They also always make the summers hotter as they are with heat warnings when it's just 2-3 warm days what I won't even would consider summer and I really don't like heat.
Also "highest temperature ever records" are much lower when I measure myself with two very different thermometers and are no records at all. There is a summer with a few hot weeks in a row every few years and always had been. It happend even more often in the past and there had not been any warnings. The last two summers here felt like no summer at all.

But other apps or websites are not better, at least they show the rain when it's already raining. But I can see it with my own eyes anyway and don't need an app for that.

I don't know when it started but I know that at least until 2010 I could rely on the forecast. I they said the day before it's starting to rain or snow the next afternoon for example it happend and they might be only wrong by an hour.
 
I don't rely on the app as 'definitive' in any way, shape or form, but its current setting of switching from temperature / brief graphic of conditions and low/high to that of the entire widget showing me its raining / snowing / windy outside with no other info is not helpful. I mean, I can see those conditions...(whether or not its right).
 
FWIW, the Pixel Weather app was very wrong about the snowstorms this past two weeks and got ridiculed in several news articles.

Always use more than one source. And always expect them to still be wrong unless you live right next to an airport.
 
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So people in the USA are now experiencing what the rest of the world has been putting up with since the very beginning of the Weather app? If you live outside the USA you just expect that it'll be laughably inaccurate.

For some reason Apple doesn't directly integrate observation data from countries' meteorological agencies (except for a few features like severe weather alerts and the radar data to do next-hour precipitation). Everything else is aggregated from third-party services that are demonstrably wrong a high proportion of the time.
 
I'm UK based and have got a few weather apps installed from Met Office, BBC Weather and the Norwegian one FR....at any time they can all have different info showing as they all have different sources and come up with different predictions most of the time especially a few days out.
 
Last night the Apple weather app reported that we got 2.2 inches of snow yesterday at my location. I went out in the yard and measured. We got 9 inches of snow lol.
The app is not at fault, nothing can predict the weather on your doorstep. If you had measured a few feet away it would have measured 4 or 11 inches. All the app can do is track current weather patterns for your area. There is no such thing as weather prediction anymore, the atmosphere is so unstable now that no "prediction" is accurate more than 36 hours out.
 
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