Comment by brewdad
3 years ago
It becomes useless when it was 32 degrees at midnight. But now, as I sit here on a Thursday morning, it shows the low for today as 28 degrees and tomorrow as 40 degrees. What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out? Will it be closer to 40 or continue dropping and be closer to freezing? Is it safe to put my sensitive plants back outside? Perhaps it shows 28 again but is that for early Friday morning or late Friday night?
In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn. That also happens to be the time of day when most of us are first leaving the house. That's a pretty important piece of information to have and it isn't there at a glance.
> In almost all cases the coldest part of the day is right around dawn.
Probably true, and yet the counterexamples are when the temperature forecast is particularly important when I'm choosing what to wear. Any simplification of the temperature forecast into daily lows and highs will fail certain use cases, so I think it's very reasonable to make the daily lows and highs as well- and simply-defined as possible and provide an hourly forecast so that people can also check for the potential edge cases.
Why not both? Keep the normal highs and lows we expect from our weather stations and websites, then display the temperature variance in a view that doesn't require you to drill into the app view clicks / drags.
I don't see any defensible opinion to let the lows be during/before sunrise.
Given that the suns movements are pretty predictable, it seems suboptimal to define counter to something that happens almost every day.
But the most important weather changes to see forecasts for are the ones caused by weather systems moving in which are mostly independent of the time of day. Those are the ones that catch you by surprise wearing the wrong clothes.
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> What will I need to wear Friday morning when I go out?
Can’t you just check Friday’s temps? I’m not sure why you’d expect this info out of Thursday.
Absolutely this, I think OP has an atypical mental model of the daily boundaries of temperature, we’ve been conditioned to think of daily highs and lows from radio and local news television forecasts. You can’t just look at the app in isolation of decades of social conditioning that predate the iPhone and weather apps.