So yeah, when it rains, it might take a few hours for that to flow into your weather app.
It's a direct result of DOGE.
Other apps have a different government?
I pull weather data from multiple apps all the time because I’m a weather nerd and they all agree equally poorly.
The accuracy of weather data has been largely unaffected since DOGE took hold. The reliability of the infra, however, has suffered somewhat. There are more outages now than there ever were, with a massive spike in outages, not kidding, the month DOGE was at its peak. At that time we even saw significant manifest changes - stupid stuff like clearly LLM-generated json fields that were whole sentences instead of the key/value pairs from the schema. It was a wild time.
Anyway downstream we're mostly fine nowadays. I can still follow storm tracks accurately, see real time responses, correlate with pilot reports and lightning strikes, compare with aircraft telemetry mostly favorably, etc etc. It's quite remarkable what high-end weather products are able to do, the ones you have to work for.
We do, however, merge several free/paid sources into one picture. Rarely do I find serious disagreement, but it does happen.
I ask alexa and it generally does fine. If uncertain I go outside for a bit and look at clouds.
For the details, you just have to know how your local weather works - thunderstorms come in squall lines here, or are hot-day flash storms.
Blizzards follow warm still weather the same way, but mostly in Jan-Mar, when the jet stream curls away and will snap back to bring arctic air down.
Moisture (rain/slush potential) follows California rain by 2 days or so. If my friends in cali complain about rain, I know we're gonna have school closures if in the winter.
If I really need to drill in on rain/snow chance, I google for a weather radar and do prediction in my own head. (windy.com is ok, accuweather is real data to watch). Storms generally move linearly or rotate, and gentle rain is wide while torrential rain is clustered.
Locally, many of the old wives tales about the shape of clouds or direction of wind vs prevailing (with against, cross-grain) are true enough for 12h-24h predictions in upper midwest USA.
If you use Google 99% of the time and only check other apps when Google is wrong, then that's a biased experiments.
Google does update its forecast more frequently, and usually is as accurate as the others for the hour ahead. And the longer range 3+ day forecasts aren't noticeably worse either. It's just the intermediate 4 - 48 hour stuff that they're surprisingly terrible with, but that's exactly the time period I most care about in everyday use!
It really does come down to data source quality and access…that’s the crux of it.
I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?)
I remember being _very_ impressed like 15 years ago about how I would have _hourly_ weather forecasts (in particular around the rain) that seemed like magic! And then things... seemed to slowly get worse (at least in Tokyo)
a couple years ago I was chatting with a friend in Kyoto. They used to live in Tokyo and had made the _exactly_ aligned comment like: "I was used to the rain forecasts being not so accurate anymore. After moving to Kyoto they seemed to be quite good! And now they're also bad here. Am I cursed?"
I looked at some 5G rollout maps and you could see Kyoto rollout happened a bit around the time frame they were complaining about....
Anyways I think for most people (at least for myself) weather forecasting seems like this odd dark magic that can't work at all, but there was a window in which it _felt_ like it was super accurate. At least in my personal experience
The short version of the "spectrum" issue is that 5G is being allocated in bands very close to the microwave spectra where atmospheric water vapor emits. A bevy of public and commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit passively monitor these microwave spectra and produce extremely important information that is assimilated into numerical weather models.
The federal government sets limits on "out-of-band emissions" for operators emitting in the allocated 5G spectra. These emissions can bleed over into the microwave water vapor bands, creating noise that masks the natural presence of water vapor. The limits for this out-of-band emission is on the order of ~10-20 dB, and there's some work in the atmospheric science literature suggesting that this is enough to confound certain water vapor retrievals. That basically means we lose these observations that help constrain the forecast.
There isn't much indication that this is a serious issue in day-to-day meteorology at the moment. But it's an issue which will be significantly more difficult to unroll and claw back than to simply protect key spectra in the first place.
On recent visits to Tokyo, with my current habits, the general crowd (who presumably check some app) has been the more reliable forecast. Either everyone has an umbrella in their hand or they don't. And I discover whether I should have brought my umbrella or if I'll be lugging it around pointlessly, just far enough from my hotel to be stuck with my choice
I'm building a tool right now that uses an ensemble to determine wind gust likelihood, which is useful for safety critical work on construction sites and the like.
As a former Googler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is an integration that is "planned" -- but just not done yet.
And some good handful of people are planning to wring a promo out of work. "Implemented weather UI in Android that is 63% more accurate." ;)
>The Google Weather forecast is created from an internal forecasting system that utilizes weather models and observations from global weather agencies.
It also lists the data sources it uses, but is vague about what model(s) it feeds the source data into.
I guesstimate that it has less than 50% accuracy for my area