“My wife is married to a meteorologist, and she will straight up question me if her favorite weather app says something different than my forecast,” Lanza told me. No people on the planet have a more tortured and conflicted relationship with weather apps than those who interpret forecasting models for a living. “But it’s that 20 percent where people get burned that’s a problem.” “Eighty percent of the year, a weather app is going to work fine,” Matt Lanza, a forecaster who runs Houston’s Space City Weather, told me. But when it comes to how people feel about weather apps, these edge cases-which usually take place during severe weather events-are what stick in a person’s mind. On an average day, you’re probably going to see a similar forecast from app to app and on television. Traditional meteorologists interpret these models based on their training as well as their gut instinct and past regional weather patterns, and different weather apps and services tend to use their own secret sauce of algorithms to divine their predictions. But all of these forecasts are working off of similar data, which are pulled from places such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. There are tens of thousands of them, from the simply designed Apple Weather to the expensive, complex, data-rich Windy.App. Nearly two decades into the smartphone era-when anyone can theoretically harness the power of government weather data and dissect dozens of complex, real-time charts and models-we are still getting caught in the rain. But the apps have produced a new level of frustration, at least judging by hundreds of cranky tweets over the past decade. People love to complain about weather forecasts, dating back to when local-news meteorologists were the primary source for those planning their morning commutes. Dozens of times, the Apple Weather app has lulled me into a false sense of security, leaving me wet and betrayed after a run, bike ride, or round of golf. The Apple app, although not rated by ForecastAdvisor, has a reputation for off-the-mark forecasts and has been consistently criticized for presenting faulty radar screens, mixing up precipitation totals, or, as it did last week, breaking altogether. The Weather Channel’s app, by comparison, comes in at 83 percent. #CARROT WEATHER VS DARK SKY CODE#The cult favorite Dark Sky, for example, which shut down earlier this year and was rolled into the Apple Weather app, accurately predicted the high temperature in my zip code only 39 percent of the time, according to ForecastAdvisor, which evaluates online weather providers. At best, they perform about as well as meteorologists, but some of the most popular ones fare much worse. Weather forecasts are always a game of prediction and probabilities, but these apps seem to fail more often than they should. But there is one specific corner where technological advances haven’t kept up: weather apps. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty.
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