Comment by bastawhiz
15 hours ago
It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.
It's because the current administration cut NOAAs funding, which means fewer weather balloons, which means less data to make a prediction. And it means less real time updates.
So yeah, when it rains, it might take a few hours for that to flow into your weather app.
It's a direct result of DOGE.
>and every other app I check shows it.
Other apps have a different government?
From my experience, it's quite hit and miss for every app.
If you use Google 99% of the time and only check other apps when Google is wrong, then that's a biased experiments.
That person is probably misremembering or looking later after the update.
I pull weather data from multiple apps all the time because I’m a weather nerd and they all agree equally poorly.
I've stopped using google weather here in the UK as well because of how inaccurate its been over the past few years and have just fallen back on the BBC. Maybe its related, maybe not.
Yeah, the Met Office and BBC (which I believe use data from Meteo France) are both much more accurate for "later today" weather than Google for me in London.
Google does update its forecast more frequently, and usually is as accurate as the others for the hour ahead. And the longer range 3+ day forecasts aren't noticeably worse either. It's just the intermediate 4 - 48 hour stuff that they're surprisingly terrible with, but that's exactly the time period I most care about in everyday use!
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I'm interested on how you drew the cause/effect of this, is there non-biased sources? Has google said as much, and how does this explain why some models are more accurate?
There is little to no evidence that the current degradation of the US upper air backbone is regularly contributing to degraded forecast skill. That might change as we head into the more active northern hemisphere winter.
That's because NOAA are not doing the tests that would produce such evidence.
There was a lot of evidence last winter. But with the active El Niño it’s starting earlier this year.
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Honestly, the iOS weather app is hyper accurate I’ve found in Europe in comparison to America…
It really does come down to data source quality and access…that’s the crux of it.
This does pass the smell test. What is your evidence that DOGE has caused even one weather forecast to be less accurate?
This isn't a super serious comment (and an opportunity for someone to speak up on this) but...
I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?)
I remember being _very_ impressed like 15 years ago about how I would have _hourly_ weather forecasts (in particular around the rain) that seemed like magic! And then things... seemed to slowly get worse (at least in Tokyo)
a couple years ago I was chatting with a friend in Kyoto. They used to live in Tokyo and had made the _exactly_ aligned comment like: "I was used to the rain forecasts being not so accurate anymore. After moving to Kyoto they seemed to be quite good! And now they're also bad here. Am I cursed?"
I looked at some 5G rollout maps and you could see Kyoto rollout happened a bit around the time frame they were complaining about....
Anyways I think for most people (at least for myself) weather forecasting seems like this odd dark magic that can't work at all, but there was a window in which it _felt_ like it was super accurate. At least in my personal experience
> I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?)
The short version of the "spectrum" issue is that 5G is being allocated in bands very close to the microwave spectra where atmospheric water vapor emits. A bevy of public and commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit passively monitor these microwave spectra and produce extremely important information that is assimilated into numerical weather models.
The federal government sets limits on "out-of-band emissions" for operators emitting in the allocated 5G spectra. These emissions can bleed over into the microwave water vapor bands, creating noise that masks the natural presence of water vapor. The limits for this out-of-band emission is on the order of ~10-20 dB, and there's some work in the atmospheric science literature suggesting that this is enough to confound certain water vapor retrievals. That basically means we lose these observations that help constrain the forecast.
There isn't much indication that this is a serious issue in day-to-day meteorology at the moment. But it's an issue which will be significantly more difficult to unroll and claw back than to simply protect key spectra in the first place.
A couple of years in Tokyo gave me great trust in certain weather apps for eerily precise minute-by-minute rainfall predictions. After a few years back in Sydney, my trust in them has dropped back down to the usual uncertain baseline, and my reliance on them has been mostly replaced with my own rough assessment of the air and sky.
On recent visits to Tokyo, with my current habits, the general crowd (who presumably check some app) has been the more reliable forecast. Either everyone has an umbrella in their hand or they don't. And I discover whether I should have brought my umbrella or if I'll be lugging it around pointlessly, just far enough from my hotel to be stuck with my choice
Weather 2 doesn't seem to have been an ensemble model. Weather 3 is, so theoretically it can get more accurate outcomes by taking the probabilistic analysis of several models concurrently to determine the most likely weather conditions.
I'm building a tool right now that uses an ensemble to determine wind gust likelihood, which is useful for safety critical work on construction sites and the like.
WeatherNext 2 was based on the FGN architecture described in [1]. It was explicitly designed and trained to produce ensemble forecasts (it was trained in such a way that the output ensemble optimized a CRPS metrics). In fact, it was a set of 4 different model weights, each of which was seeded with a random noise vector to produce an array of 16 forecasts for a total of 64 ensemble members. WeatherNext 3 trimmed that down from 4 to 2 separate model weights to use.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w
Awesome comment, thanks for the info!
The Google daily and hourly forecasts aren't great, but the weather map forecast is excellent. Where does that come from? What's generating the predicted movement of the storm clouds?
Nexrad? NOAA?
Same experience.
As a former Googler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is an integration that is "planned" -- but just not done yet.
And some good handful of people are planning to wring a promo out of work. "Implemented weather UI in Android that is 63% more accurate." ;)
does google actually use their own models in consumer products? i'm not an android user, but the weather widget in the google search results for my area always seems to be attributed to weather.com.
The "Google Weather" Android app links to a page that says
>The Google Weather forecast is created from an internal forecasting system that utilizes weather models and observations from global weather agencies.
It also lists the data sources it uses, but is vague about what model(s) it feeds the source data into.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/13687874
At one point they did release the most accurate weather model by far, but it actually decreased usage compared to showing a weather forecast more skewed towards "happy" temperatures and weather. I'm certain this is still the case and likely explains why you are seeing a more positive (no rain) version of the weather.
I see the same sentiment any time any weather app is posted. Especially when Dark Sky comes up
Same experience. I moved to Windy and I just look at the weather radar and make my own prediction.
I guesstimate that it has less than 50% accuracy for my area
Same here, if its raining Windy.com radar will always show it, but often Google Weather does not show it, despite saying its updated "now". Sometimes it seems to be a tiling issue, where there will be a blob of rain on the map but cut off at some boundary over the forecast area.