Well the weather by nature is a chaotic mess of pressure systems and weather patterns, a major cause being the junction between the hot and cold temperatures of the 2 hemispheres, no?
I say 'washing machine' as it is a swirling mass of unpredictability. Yes there are obvious patterns that follow the seasons, but forecasts are required to be much more accurate than predicting the weather by patterns of the season.
They need to be accurate to each day, predicting temp, rainfall, wind etc. etc. The only way to do that is to try and predict how this chaotic system will progress over a period of time. Thats why all these weather agency talk about their new 'supercomputers' able to create more accurate forecasts. The processing power required to build these models is enormous.
No matter if you are forecasting locally or across the multiple states or countries, it still depends on forecasting the outcome of this chaotic system.