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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

I wonder in all sincerity, how will it compete with looking out the window and making your own educated guess? Or looking at the NOAA radar hourly precipitation loop, as I do, and planning accordingly?

Because what appears to be missing is any sort of feedback mechanism by which to improve the accuracy of it's predictions on the same scale as which it is making its predictions.

In other words, if the prediction was rain in 8 minutes for 15 minutes, how can the program determine if it was accurate? (And suggests the question, is rain in 4 minutes for 18 minutes an acceptable level of inaccuracy?). Where does the data that it was 18 minutes of rain come from?

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Concerning your first question: This is largely a topological problem: If you're surrounded by mountains, the weather behaves distinctly different than on the open plain. In the second case, high wind speeds lead to rapid changes in conditions. For that scenario, such an app might give you some useful information.

I, myself, happen to work in a meteorological company and have an easy indicator: When our meteorologists all take off at the same time, rain is imminent.

>>This is largely a topological problem: If you're surrounded by mountains...

Topological or topographical? It's kinda both in your example.

Topographical was the word I was looking for.

I'm no expert, but I don't think topology features much in the weather models. It's mostly numerical analysis and statistics.

yes. (note: not OP, but I'm not lying :P)

We constantly monitor how accurate our predictions are, and try to adjust accordingly. We'll have a blog post soon that explains more about how it works.

As for competing with looking at NOAA radar images, try a little experiment: Next time rain is headed your way, look at a radar animation and try to quantify when the rain will start. The fact that I'm completely unable to do that (even while looking at the damn radar animation) with any accuracy is the reason I started building this app.

Actualy the Wundermap on wunderground.com does this very well. It does a Google maps overlay so you can see your exact location. Also there are various options for highlighting the rain clouds and estimating the direction in which they are moving. Though I agree that using this product could be much easier when all you want to know the rain is coming and how long it might last.

One other use case is if you have significantly different weather conditions a short distance from one another. I live near the coastal mountains; a 20 minute drive could take me from nice and sunny to cold and rainy.

Your points about feedback are valid, however.

Does anyone think it could also be useful to tie a twitter feed in with weather information? I feel like weather is one of those things that ppl complain about on twitter all the time; some simple geolocation and keyword matching and you could pull up recent geolocated tweets near you. Could be a nice qualitative weather report to accompany the actual data (people like a personal face on the weather).

In the Netherlands we have the site http://buienradar.nl/

It is very popular and it beats looking out of the window by a large margin. When it is raining you can see very accurately how long it's going to take for it to stop so you can decide if it's worth waiting. When it's not raining but it looks like it could be going to rain you can similarly make good predictions.

Note that they're not doing actual prediction, they're just showing radar images of the clouds of the last hour.

Even the name of the app points to its competition. If the sky is dark I am most likely to bring an umbrella. It is however beneficial if I know I need to walk somewhere in a given amount of time. Seeing when the sky will be dark but no rain would be nice, but Ill still have my umbrella with me regardless.

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