I've used Weather.com and Accuweather.com for years but both have become incredibly unreliable. It's comical at this point how bad these sites are at weather forecasting.
The commerical apps use the same or similar data for temperature modeling, so I'd be surprised if there is any major fluctuation there.
If you're looking for more accurate precipitation predictions, the Clime app from NOAA is the gold standard. There is a free version and it uses real time NOAA satellite data to show if it's going to rain where you are. It's astonishingly accurate.
christian, yeah, it's more precipitation that I am interested in in terms of a watering schedule.
Are you using a smart irrigation controller? I'm upstate in New York now so I don't have to water, but I was in Texas for a few years and used a Rachio and it saved me several hundred dollars a year. They source their data from https://www.aerisweather.com/.
It uses National Weather Service, and if you look at the size of the app vs. the other popular weather apps, it's tiny so less drain on the battery and less crap on your phone.
I use Myradar app. I swear the commercial sites, especially weather.com, seem to display more intense colors on the Doppler radar to get people riled up about incoming storms.
As a very long-time snowmobiler who worked in the weather-dependent powersports industries, I have paid very close attention to weather forecasting for the NE and upper Midwest US and eastern Canada for seven decades.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
As a very long-time snowmobiler who worked in the weather-dependent powersports industries, I have paid very close attention to weather forecasting for the NE and upper Midwest US and eastern Canada for seven decades.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
I've been surfing the ones above and each seems to have limitations. Ironically, the compiler listed above says Accuweather was the most accurate in my area.
What's weird is the forecasting has gotten worse. At least in my area. It was bad two years ago. It was worse last year. And it is worse now than it was last year. They retroactively change their forecasts too which is comical. (i.e., 5 percent chance of rain becomes 90 percent chance once it actually starts raining).
which is why there are errors in forecasting -- interestingly Red DOg's experience - 3 hours away from me with the same service is interesting because I swear by the NWS
FWIW myself and many of my fellow aviators routinely use MyRadar app. It's elegantly simple and free. Keep in mind that any radar picture you see may be 5-15 minutes old.
when I'm flying, I never rely on one source. If I know the weather at my destination may be iffy, I treat the weather sites like I treat the news sites. I look at all of them, and do my best to filter out the noise and extrapolate what's really going on.
I'll look at accuweather, compare it with wx underground, noaa, the local news, weather.gov, etc and I generally can get a pretty good idea what to expect after looking at all the noise.
My wife pulls up radar on her iPhone, I pull it up on my Pixel. Two completely different views at times. And in south Florida and the random rain we get, really aggravating.
Weather can change not only very quickly, but also can change hugely within a very small area. So weather forecasts are all approximations anyway, with local conditions often, but not always, driven by altitude, proximity to water, very local humidity, etc.
Some of the local TV guys here in WNY do a good job explaining that to their viewers, but the services who cover larger areas can't / don't try to explain it.
There have been many, many times when I've been in a situation where moving a few yards would literally change the weather by a lot.
In one instance, near Boonville, NY, I was able to literally ride my snowmobile along the knife edge of a snow storm. It was snowing heavily on one side of me and not at all on the other side. The width of the border zone was no more than a couple of feet. No matter what the forecast was, it depended which side of that storm border you were located. A 50-50 chance to have a wrong forecast.
I've seen similar situations all over upstate New York, particularly near the Great Lakes. There's a spot along the Barge Canal in the Rochester area that seems to be a frequent border between rain and no rain, so how do you forecast for that?
Another lesson in how weather works was at Devil's Mountain near Mont Laurier, Quebec. It's a 2,000 foot tall volcano remainder. I've been in a situation where the sun was shining brightly at the bottom of the mountain, but up at the top it was socked in and snowing like hell. Took us just a few minutes to move from one zone to the other going up or down. Another 50-50 chance for a wrong forecast depending on what it was and where the exact location in question was.
So you have to take anything that is predicted with a grain of salt because it might not rain where you are, but it could rain as close as right down the street. I've seen that happen, too.
What is really cool about Wunderground is you can buy, fairly inexpensively, wifi enabled weather station for your house and connect it to Wunderground so that you become a monitoring point in their network. I've always wanted to do that.
RE: RE: They pretty much ALL SUCK except the locals.
As a very long-time snowmobiler who worked in the weather-dependent powersports industries, I have paid very close attention to weather forecasting for the NE and upper Midwest US and eastern Canada for seven decades.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
I've been surfing the ones above and each seems to have limitations. Ironically, the compiler listed above says Accuweather was the most accurate in my area.
What's weird is the forecasting has gotten worse. At least in my area. It was bad two years ago. It was worse last year. And it is worse now than it was last year. They retroactively change their forecasts too which is comical. (i.e., 5 percent chance of rain becomes 90 percent chance once it actually starts raining).
I have noticed this as well. I don't know if it's climate change, or what, but despite all of the technology available today to forecast the weather, I still find myself not trusting anything past 12 hours out.
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
It's where the Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Weather Underground and all the rest get their data.
Not sure that is accurate. The radar on AccuWeather and Weather.com are completely different right now.
I'll give you an example of why I asked this question.
The two sites I used said there was 100 percent chance of rain today where I live. It hasn't rained at all here.
They all get their data for forecasting from NWS. Not sure why live radar would be different no matter where they get that from. The difference in forecasts is the result of how they interpret the data.
Live radar can be different for a lot of reasons including
type of radar, height above average terrain of the antenna, and exact location of the antenna particularly as it refers to things that generate false echoes (windmills are a REAL problem with this - you absolutely need to know where they are and there's more of them all the time). Radar range is an issue with location.
Also note that people have to be experienced interpreters of radar signals.
Radar can sometimes see things that don't add up to inexperienced observers. For instance, radar can spot precipitation that is evaporating before it reaches the ground (virga) so you need to know something about the relative humidity of the area before interpreting the raw data. Likewise, in some situations radar can actually miss precipitation that is from very low clouds.
So one radar reading can be significantly different that another one.
...was really head and shoulders above the others in terms of the radar, then they were bought out by Apple. The claim is that many of the DS features have been incorporated into the Apple weather app, and I believe that's probably true based on recent usage.
At the moment I have the following additional apps on my iphone:
MyRadar
Wunderground
Windy
If you navigate to the forecast page, click on the graph found on the lower portion of the page, you get a pretty detailed hour-by-hour forecast without the graphical fluff.
I have shortcuts to my usual zipcodes (and places where I'm about to visit) on my phone so I can see the forecast with one press. Weather.gov East Rutherford - ( New Window )
Link - ( New Window )
+1
We use those in aviation.
I kind of view accuweather as the USA Today of weather.
If you're looking for more accurate precipitation predictions, the Clime app from NOAA is the gold standard. There is a free version and it uses real time NOAA satellite data to show if it's going to rain where you are. It's astonishingly accurate.
For my zip in 2022, the weather channel, accuweather, and wunderground are all ~85% accurate.
Link - ( New Window )
christian, yeah, it's more precipitation that I am interested in in terms of a watering schedule.
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
Quote:
Just enter your zip code
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
Link
Link - ( New Window )
Quote:
In comment 16115987 VTChuck said:
Quote:
Just enter your zip code
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
Link Link - ( New Window )
This.
christian, yeah, it's more precipitation that I am interested in in terms of a watering schedule.
Are you using a smart irrigation controller? I'm upstate in New York now so I don't have to water, but I was in Texas for a few years and used a Rachio and it saved me several hundred dollars a year. They source their data from https://www.aerisweather.com/.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
I've been surfing the ones above and each seems to have limitations. Ironically, the compiler listed above says Accuweather was the most accurate in my area.
What's weird is the forecasting has gotten worse. At least in my area. It was bad two years ago. It was worse last year. And it is worse now than it was last year. They retroactively change their forecasts too which is comical. (i.e., 5 percent chance of rain becomes 90 percent chance once it actually starts raining).
Quote:
WWW.WUNDERGROUND.COM
+1
I use this as well, though I'm not sure they have any inside track on accuracy.
I'll look at accuweather, compare it with wx underground, noaa, the local news, weather.gov, etc and I generally can get a pretty good idea what to expect after looking at all the noise.
This is my go to. I like the hyper local stations.
Weather Underground is now owned by Weather Company, which is owned by IBM. No longer run by Masters and Henson. Though they are still involved.
Quote:
Just enter your zip code
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
It's where the Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Weather Underground and all the rest get their data.
Quote:
In comment 16115987 VTChuck said:
Quote:
Just enter your zip code
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
It's where the Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Weather Underground and all the rest get their data.
Not sure that is accurate. The radar on AccuWeather and Weather.com are completely different right now.
I'll give you an example of why I asked this question.
The two sites I used said there was 100 percent chance of rain today where I live. It hasn't rained at all here.
For my zip in 2022, the weather channel, accuweather, and wunderground are all ~85% accurate. Link - ( New Window )
Well this site just confirmed what I experience at home - none are that good, with the best one being ~76% and none of the others even breaking 70%.
Some of the local TV guys here in WNY do a good job explaining that to their viewers, but the services who cover larger areas can't / don't try to explain it.
There have been many, many times when I've been in a situation where moving a few yards would literally change the weather by a lot.
In one instance, near Boonville, NY, I was able to literally ride my snowmobile along the knife edge of a snow storm. It was snowing heavily on one side of me and not at all on the other side. The width of the border zone was no more than a couple of feet. No matter what the forecast was, it depended which side of that storm border you were located. A 50-50 chance to have a wrong forecast.
I've seen similar situations all over upstate New York, particularly near the Great Lakes. There's a spot along the Barge Canal in the Rochester area that seems to be a frequent border between rain and no rain, so how do you forecast for that?
Another lesson in how weather works was at Devil's Mountain near Mont Laurier, Quebec. It's a 2,000 foot tall volcano remainder. I've been in a situation where the sun was shining brightly at the bottom of the mountain, but up at the top it was socked in and snowing like hell. Took us just a few minutes to move from one zone to the other going up or down. Another 50-50 chance for a wrong forecast depending on what it was and where the exact location in question was.
So you have to take anything that is predicted with a grain of salt because it might not rain where you are, but it could rain as close as right down the street. I've seen that happen, too.
Quote:
As a very long-time snowmobiler who worked in the weather-dependent powersports industries, I have paid very close attention to weather forecasting for the NE and upper Midwest US and eastern Canada for seven decades.
Here in Western NY, the National Weather Service in Buffalo is currently run by a bunch of alarmist fools who constantly cry wolf. They also don't understand the fine points of lake effect weather as Rochester meteorologist Kevin Williams has ably demonstrated.
The propaganda-billowing Weather Channel is even worse. The local temperatures for WNY that they provide are constantly high and they have even less understanding of our weather than NWS Buffalo. They completely fail to comprehend the very complex weather of upstate NY, a lot of which is locally driven by altitude differentials and proximity to bodies of water.
And most other services are taking their data and lead info from one of those two sources.
IMHO AccuWeather is better than either of those sources, at least for upstate NY and PA. I don't pay attention to downstate so I don't have any handle on how they do there. And any service that tries to deal with a wide area is going to come up short with a lot of local situations anyway, particularly around the Great Lakes.
However, the best sources seem to be Kevin Williams and other local meteorologists, particularly the local TV crews. Most of these forecasters have been here in WNY for years and they know how to interpret data that the sucking futherners can't comprehend or maybe don't even have. And even then, they are going to miss sometimes. It's the nature of the beast.
I've been surfing the ones above and each seems to have limitations. Ironically, the compiler listed above says Accuweather was the most accurate in my area.
What's weird is the forecasting has gotten worse. At least in my area. It was bad two years ago. It was worse last year. And it is worse now than it was last year. They retroactively change their forecasts too which is comical. (i.e., 5 percent chance of rain becomes 90 percent chance once it actually starts raining).
I have noticed this as well. I don't know if it's climate change, or what, but despite all of the technology available today to forecast the weather, I still find myself not trusting anything past 12 hours out.
Quote:
In comment 16116027 gidiefor said:
Quote:
In comment 16115987 VTChuck said:
Quote:
Just enter your zip code
this is what I use -- it's the best one out there imo
It's where the Weather Channel, AccuWeather, Weather Underground and all the rest get their data.
Not sure that is accurate. The radar on AccuWeather and Weather.com are completely different right now.
I'll give you an example of why I asked this question.
The two sites I used said there was 100 percent chance of rain today where I live. It hasn't rained at all here.
They all get their data for forecasting from NWS. Not sure why live radar would be different no matter where they get that from. The difference in forecasts is the result of how they interpret the data.
Also note that people have to be experienced interpreters of radar signals.
Radar can sometimes see things that don't add up to inexperienced observers. For instance, radar can spot precipitation that is evaporating before it reaches the ground (virga) so you need to know something about the relative humidity of the area before interpreting the raw data. Likewise, in some situations radar can actually miss precipitation that is from very low clouds.
So one radar reading can be significantly different that another one.
You would think that radar is radar .... and even if there are 27 different radar systems out there - they are all taking pictures of the same thing?
How do they get it all wrong?
At the moment I have the following additional apps on my iphone:
MyRadar
Wunderground
Windy
+1
If you navigate to the forecast page, click on the graph found on the lower portion of the page, you get a pretty detailed hour-by-hour forecast without the graphical fluff.
I have shortcuts to my usual zipcodes (and places where I'm about to visit) on my phone so I can see the forecast with one press.
Weather.gov East Rutherford - ( New Window )