I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
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.
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…
Butterfly effect. Even Hari Sheldon in the Foundation series couldn’t do that.
Psychohistory was designed for large groups. It wasn’t designed for single creatures like butterflies
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.
At the time Hari tried to apply it at the small scale, it was impossible. I believe by the time Gaia takes over the science could be applied to the single organism but that also feels like cheating.
The whole point of prelude and forward was that his attempts to start on the smaller scale by going backwards in time was a fools errand and impossible but starting with the relatively small scale of just Trantor was doable as it had sufficient mass to apply the generalized mathematics towards. The variables on the smaller scales were too numerous but as you abstract towards larger bodies, it reduces the complexity to the point it becomes calculable.
Well, not the whole point but still
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.
So, what Hari does is basically game theory on a massive scale. The larger the group, the less complexity because you’re abstracting the different possible issues individuals would have out of the problem. Instead of making it more complex, it simplifies the whole thing because all the chaotic bits cancel each other out.
And slight spoiler warning for an old story but you find out later that the whole thing isn’t just predicted ahead of time and let loose but a group of people follow along in the shadows to keep the plan on track.
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.
Just out of curiosity, why do you dislike AccuWeather?
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.
Thank you for your answer :D! I’ll use the equivalent of your national weather service henceforth.