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bilsbie

It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again. What kind of magic were they doing?

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They're back at it again

https://acmeweather.com/

https://www.theverge.com/tech/883089/acme-weather-forecast-a...

Oh, they finally launched it in Europe. Let’s see whether it’s as good as people say. :)

well, that's interesting. the design it's a bit of a letdown - very very very low information density, lots of horizontal scrolling, a tab bar item dedicated to notifications (which one never changes) and another one dedicated to community (which is empty of content). Hopefully good data and good notifications make up for the poor design.

Dark Sky is still one of my all time favorite app. The accuracy of the forecast within the coming hour is to this day unmatched. It constantly reminded me of Back to the Future 2, where Doc says the rain will stop in “in exactly 5 seconds”

> It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again.

'Nowcasting' is an area of active research, both with machine learning and with physics-informed or visual flow approaches.

Part of the problem from the machine learning side is that these are _huge_ problems. NVidia's StormCast (https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2024-08_kilometer-sc...) works globally at kilometer scales, and you can imagine how big those grids are. Even with patch training, you're dealing with very large datasets.

At the same time, this is not exactly a high-profile area of research. National weather centres focus on actionable medium-range weather predictions, and meteorologists can look at radar themselves and perform mark-one-eyeball predictions for very short-range watches and warnings. Some private-sector actors will pay for short range predictions, but they're often looking for something hyperlocalized (e.g. weather at this particular construction site, for crane safety) or specialized (near-real-time cloud and wind predictions for renewable energy).

Most public-accessible weather predictions are downstream of either a public-sector effort (which doesn't internalize benefits, leading to under-resourcing) or a byproduct of another private-sector offering.

The only forecasted rainfall for local areas within a very short timeframe. This made it possible to utilize simple factors to predict the near future.

It is built into Apple Weather after Apple purchased them.

It feels like dark sky was more proactive with push notifications

its nowhere near as good as it was in Dark Sky. the apple weather app is pretty bad where I'm at.

While that might be true but apple weather still fails compared to dark sky. I still don't use it for radar like I did with dark sky - they effed up the UI.

> It is built into Apple Weather after Apple purchased them.

Did Apple lobotomize the tech when they integrated it, or lose access to whatever upstream data Dark Sky had access to? Apple Weather is comically bad (though not nearly as bad as Google's weather searches).

I use it in Oregon and it's remarkably accurate at predicting rain, both timing and severity.

Apple Weather (followed by Xweather (formerly Aeris Weather)) seems the most accurate forecast for Prague when it comes to TP/FP for rain in Prague by my long term experience when I compared multiple data sources

Someone linked a ranking site in the comments here. Apple weather is one of the most accurate ones.

Then there is an issue with the ranking. It is much less accurate than NOAA.

Something changed because Apple Weather has never been as accurate as Dark Sky for me, especially for rain forecast.

I used to be able to go on walks without an umbrella because of how reliable it was at predicting when rain was going to restart. If I do that with Apple Weather, I get home wet.

here's an explanation of their 'computer vision approach' to local weather forecasts: https://jackadam.github.io/2011/how-dark-sky-works/

"We create a 3-channel image where the red channel represents velocity in the x-direction, the blue channel represents velocity in the y-direction, and the green channel represents change in storm intensity" and then use computer vision techniques to predict what happens next

post was written after a discussion here on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3187326

Dark sky was awful and all of its acclaim comes from confirmation bias. In seattle I'd see its forecast change by the minute. The whole point of a forecast is to know what will happen and if that keeps changing, then we do not know.

I never used that, but I like Rain Parrot in Australia. Not sure if it's similar. It will tell me that it's likely to rain in x minutes, then stop y minutes later, and it's almost always fairly accurate.

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