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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that highly subjective to where you live? Because I moved to Scandinavia and the forecast here is so incredibly bad, compared to central europe.

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Central europe (minus the alps) is way easier to predict. You can just look at the clouds on a satelite and see how they move, usually west to east, and then extrapolate linearily.

All the fjords and mountains and lakes in norway really make it hard, to precicesly model it. And I think they strongly and chaotically influence the weather in sweden as well.

Also, there are way more people living in central europe, so probably more effort is spend on them.

The accuracy is definitely location dependent, but I anecdotally agree with the GP that the accuracy has improved substantially, at least for the UK where I am.

Ten years ago, the weather forecast was so unreliable that I just assumed anything could happen on a given day, no matter the season. Frequently it would be unable to even tell you whether it was currently raining, and my heuristic for next day forecast instead was to just assume the weather would be the same as today.

Nowadays I find the next day forecasts are nearly always accurate and hourly precipitation forecasts are good enough that I can plan my cycles and walks around them.

Yes, driven by local data collection. More tightly packed ground stations and the availability of atmospheric measurement at various altitudes will improve accuracy.

Also, the weather is just a lot more predictable in some areas than others.

I think it's mostly this. If you look at a weather radar map, sometimes you see a speckled pattern of rain where there is heavy rain in places, and 100 yards away there is no rain at all. No way you can predict that multiple days out.

This. Just some days ago I had a conversation with meteorologist who said exactly this - the weather has never been easy to predict in northen Europe and it has become even less predictable with climate change and global warming.

I feel this living in the path of moisture coming from the Gulf of Mexico. My phone has gotten good at letting me know when the rain will start and stop to within a few minutes, but whatever data source Apple uses still struggles with near-term prediction (day+) in the summer when there are random popup storms all the time.

Moving from Phoenix to Austin was a bit of a shock. Weather prediction in Phoenix is essentially perfect. In Austin the forecast seems much less accurate.

This is partly due to less satellite coverage, something this project is trying to fix: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Meteoro...

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