Comment by jedberg
13 hours ago
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.
13 hours ago
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.
My work involves parsing real-time weather data at an existential level - because our entire use case is built around providing weather-related alerts and re-routes for aircraft.
The accuracy of weather data has been largely unaffected since DOGE took hold. The reliability of the infra, however, has suffered somewhat. There are more outages now than there ever were, with a massive spike in outages, not kidding, the month DOGE was at its peak. At that time we even saw significant manifest changes - stupid stuff like clearly LLM-generated json fields that were whole sentences instead of the key/value pairs from the schema. It was a wild time.
Anyway downstream we're mostly fine nowadays. I can still follow storm tracks accurately, see real time responses, correlate with pilot reports and lightning strikes, compare with aircraft telemetry mostly favorably, etc etc. It's quite remarkable what high-end weather products are able to do, the ones you have to work for.
We do, however, merge several free/paid sources into one picture. Rarely do I find serious disagreement, but it does happen.
question for you but what weather app / tool are you using in your personal life, as someone who works in that general industry.
You're gonna laugh, but...
I ask alexa and it generally does fine. If uncertain I go outside for a bit and look at clouds.
For the details, you just have to know how your local weather works - thunderstorms come in squall lines here, or are hot-day flash storms.
Blizzards follow warm still weather the same way, but mostly in Jan-Mar, when the jet stream curls away and will snap back to bring arctic air down.
Moisture (rain/slush potential) follows California rain by 2 days or so. If my friends in cali complain about rain, I know we're gonna have school closures if in the winter.
If I really need to drill in on rain/snow chance, I google for a weather radar and do prediction in my own head. (windy.com is ok, accuweather is real data to watch). Storms generally move linearly or rotate, and gentle rain is wide while torrential rain is clustered.
Locally, many of the old wives tales about the shape of clouds or direction of wind vs prevailing (with against, cross-grain) are true enough for 12h-24h predictions in upper midwest USA.