I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
All of those weather services just pull data from NOAA. There’s no competition, besides making up stuff beyond what NOAA predicts.
If all the private company weather services were only getting their info from the NOAA we wouldn’t have such varying results most of the time. Which is basically my point. The results vary because they don’t just use the NOAA’s data and predictions. The second one is actually the US Armed Forces.
Their results vary because, like I said, they just make shit up. They have their own formulas using NOAA and other government data, but they’re still just making it up to look like they provide value so you’ll pay for their services. There’s other global weather models, like ECMWF, but they’re all government orgs. Windy has a great article on it. https://windy.app/blog/ecmwf-vs-gfs-differences-accuracy.html
If your app doesn’t tell you where it’s getting its data from then it’s using GFS from NOAA and it’s charging you for the free data it gets from there.