Just out of curiosity, what are the reasons you dislike AccuWeather?
Comment on Why are weather apps so bad at telling you the current weather?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I am a pilot and flight instructor. I took a full year of meteorology at ERAU. Most weather forecast products presented to the general public are completely worthless, and we really should run “AccuWeather” out of business.
The temperature number they show you for what it is “now” was probably taken by the AWOS at the closest municipal airport to your location. If you’ve ever noticed like a car GPS reporting weather from three towns over and not the one you’re in right now, it’s because the town you’re in right now doesn’t have a nearby airport or it doesn’t have an AWOS.
10-day forecasts are generated by tarot cards and have no basis in reality. Actual aviation weather forecasts seldom reach out beyond 24 hours.
Your best bet for getting a complete understanding of the weather is to start by looking at the GOES satellite imagery, ie actually look at the Earth from geosynchronous orbit and look at the clouds. You know those maps with the blue lines with triangles on them and red lines with half circles and big blue Hs and big red Ls? Those are called Prognostic charts, those map where high and low pressure systems and fronts are. Look at one of those and compare them to the satellite images. Then look at Doppler radar imagery, which shows where precipitation is. Look at what it’s been doing for the last few hours, and then you can get a good sense of generally what the weather is going to do in the next few hours. Beyond that, not even God knows because the prick hasn’t decided yet.
ABasilPlant@lemmy.world 3 months ago
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
My main beef with them is they take data from the public National Weather Service and package it for profit, and they’re backing proposed legislation that would prevent the NWS from distributing their weather data directly to the public.
Other than that, most of what AccuWeather does is make the pretty weather maps for the TV stations, and most of the way they make them pretty is by making them less accurate, complete and precise. To a pilot, for whom weather information is a critical safety tool, an AccuWeather product is a bit like a traffic light covered in a half inch thick layer of Spongebob stickers.
The NWS is already trying to measure and predict the giant ball of chaos that is the Earth’s atmosphere with probably fewer tools than they’d like, and AccuWeather takes that data and makes it worse so that it’s prettier for TV.
In conclusion, fuck AccuWeather.
ABasilPlant@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Thank you for your answer :D! I’ll use the equivalent to our national weather service henceforth.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It amazes me how some people seem to go through life not realizing weather is fundamentally chaotic.
Like, even if all you do is look out a window from time to time…
puppy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Butterfly effect. Even Hari Sheldon in the Foundation series couldn’t do that.
DokPsy@infosec.pub 3 months ago
Psychohistory was designed for large groups. It wasn’t designed for single creatures like butterflies
puppy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It wasn’t because it couldn’t. Hari tried it and failed. Applying Psychohistory to only large enough populations was his compromise. This is mentioned in Prelude to Foundation. I think Hari specifically mentions how complex predicting weather is iirc. That’s why I mentioned it in the first place.
Moneo@lemmy.world 3 months ago
No shade but I could not take the premise of that book seriously. The idea that any complex system could be mapped thousands of years into the future is so incredibly unrealistic to me that I was unable to suspend my disbelief.
I’m a massive Dune fan though so I have no leg to stand on. Hold on a second while I re-calibrate my metabolism and use my genetic heritage to recall events that happened 30000 years ago.
Moneo@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s not that surprising to me. Chaos theory is not well known/understood and we are accustomed to seeing weather reports from childhood, it’s not odd to expect them to be accurate.