These guys must be officially using darts or something. I check today’s hourly weather 30 minutes ago. At that time, there was 30% chance of rain about 11:30am.
It is now 7:30am and pouring so hard that the visibility is reduced to less than 1/4 mile.
WTHey? Is Microsoft maintaining their prediction algorithms or what?
How is pouring rain inconsistent with a prediction for a 30% chance of rain?
I pit the teachers and parents who evidently failed to teach the OP the difference between “thirty” and “null” :rolleyes:
To clarify, there was no predicted chance of rain UNTIL 11:30am. The hourly forecast gives pridictions for the weather through out the day on an hourly basis. Hence, the 7:30 down pour (less than 30 minutes after checking) seemed like a serious prediction fail.
Weather.com has also become significantly in-accurate for my area on the daily and weekly basis as well. But, they should be able to at least identify a storm cell that was probably forming/formed at the time I checked.
ETA: here is the hourly forecast for Chicago as an example of what I was looking at: http://www.weather.com/weather/hourbyhour/graph/Chicago+IL+USIL0225:1:US
So their prediction for that period was 0% chance of precipitation? I have never seen that before, especially during the summer.
This is where you lose me. If they predict 30% chance of rain, and it rains, is that inaccurate?
This is relevant:
In particular:
For all we know, the conditions they were looking at had only happened three times before and none of those led to a sudden downpour. I was actually joking yesterday about the weather.com forecast initially showing a 100% chance of a thunderstorm in my area around 6pm. Throughout the day that slowly dropped to 0%. But it’s only mildly amusing because people generally don’t know what those percents mean.
I don’t expect a weather website to have continuously updating hourly weather reports for every individual town in the nation. I especially don’t expect that sort of detail during thunderstorm season, when storms appear and disappear in a short time, popping up almost randomly throughout the region. They should be dinged if they showed 0% chance of rain during a time when storms are forming.
If I really really need to know exactly when it’s going to rain, you can’t beat Weather in Motion. I can watch a storm cell bearing down on my town, and predict within just a few minutes when I need to shut all my windows. Brings me back to my nerdy high school days of being in the weather club. Back then, of course, it took probably 15 minutes to get a single map through the thermal printer.
A few years back I was at work, listening to the local radio station which was based less than a mile away. The weather forecast came on, and apparently we were going to have a lovely warm, dry evening, with a small chance of rain overnight.
Except it was already pissing it down. If they’d just stuck their heads out the the building the radio station was broadcast from, they would have been able to see the sodding rainclouds, but noooooo…
That’s a shitty forecast; 30% chance of rain means… well, 30% chance of rain.
Wish it worked for my neighborhood. During the recent drought we would watch storms coming our way on radar, only to see them juke north or south at the last minute, or even break into two storms, one passing north and one south.
My gf has lived here for 30 years and she claims it has always been that way. I assumed some sorta confirmation bias, but our neighbors all have supporting data. One neighbor set up a rain gauge. She bought two and gave one to a friend who live 2 miles west. They measure significant differences in rainfall.
Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
There’s an XKCD for everything.
in summer you can get sudden rain and thunderstorms due to instability caused by temperature. you can go from clear to rain in 15 minutes. it can rain on one side of the street and not the other. reporting locations that are 10 miles apart can have 3 inches of rain at one and zero at the other.
Weather systems are chaotic. There is a very good chance that a butterfly flapped its wings and as a result the weather pattern changed.
My recommendation is to kill butterflies not Microsoft (well go ahead and kill Microsoft, but not for this reason).
That’s what Calvin Coolidge said.
Thanks! Indeed!
I thought you were going to pit their ugly website redesign (lately, is there any other kind?) with which I’d definitely be on board.
Sure it’s obnoxious, clunky, overcrowded, and generally another good example of unbroke fixery— but hey, at least they added “Love!” and “Ugh!” buttons so we can finally get a majority opinion on the current temperature. :smack:
Local radio is not what it used to be. Most stations around here have recorded weather forecasts, often from a local TV station meteorologist, or perhaps an AccuWeather guy who is phoning in his forecast from halfway across the country. Recorded forecasts don’t do well keeping up with changing conditions …
It always bothered me when I would tell people about the few times that it was raining in my front yard but not in my backyard and they wouldn’t believe me. Even as a little kid I was smart enough to say “Well, if it’s raining in one place and not raining in another place the border has to be somewhere right?”. Once I got to high school/college I learned about the intermediate value theorem which basically said the same thing but in math terms.
This also covers the “Why didn’t you go before we left the house”/“I didn’t have to go then” scenario.