There is a great article from the German Meteorological Service on WeatherNext 3 and how AI-based weather models will probably co-exist with physics-based ones.
https://www.dwd.de/DE/wetter/thema_des_tages/2026/9/6.html (German only)
WeatherNext 3
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Re: WeatherNext 3
#42It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again. What kind of magic were they doing?
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”
Re: WeatherNext 3
#43It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.
The Google daily and hourly forecasts aren't great, but the weather map forecast is excellent. Where does that come from? What's generating the predicted movement of the storm clouds?
Re: WeatherNext 3
#44The exploration page is really easy to use. Having more reliable weather predictions is a genuinely useful product.
I disagree.. Feels very sloppy to me: - Time is UTC rather than local by default. - Units are imperial rather than metric (i.e. not basing it on users locale) - The concept of init time is not initially clear at all, so it's confusing when you click the calendar icon to see the weather forecast for a future date only to see it isn't an option, you have to use the slider. - When changing the sidebar to the "detailed"…
The legend and map colors seem strange, too. I haven't really put my finger on how or why (and I'm not going to spend much time on it), but:
Everything seems dark and desaturated, as if the the only clue we have (color!) for matching things up has been deliberately reduced.
And then: It sure does feel like the legend has even more of whatever-that-is going on than the map does.
I find it difficult to look at the map and understand the information it relays at the same time.
Re: WeatherNext 3
#45The exploration page is really easy to use. Having more reliable weather predictions is a genuinely useful product.
I disagree.. Feels very sloppy to me: - Time is UTC rather than local by default. - Units are imperial rather than metric (i.e. not basing it on users locale) - The concept of init time is not initially clear at all, so it's confusing when you click the calendar icon to see the weather forecast for a future date only to see it isn't an option, you have to use the slider. - When changing the sidebar to the "detailed"…
Time and units are toggled from the 3 dot menu. https://i.imgur.com/Vi6tvGW.png
Init time makes sense to me, it's when the forecast/model is initialized, letting you look back in the past to watch the change to the present and future.
The sidebar thing is weird, but it also can expand out.
Re: WeatherNext 3
#46It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again. What kind of magic were they doing?
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.
its nowhere near as good as it was in Dark Sky. the apple weather app is pretty bad where I'm at.
Re: WeatherNext 3
#47It’s crazy we’ll never have forecasts as good as dark sky again. What kind of magic were they doing?
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.
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.
Re: WeatherNext 3
#48[flagged]
Re: WeatherNext 3
#49It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.
This isn't a super serious comment (and an opportunity for someone to speak up on this) but...
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
Re: WeatherNext 3
#50It's great that they're working on this, but I am puzzled at how absolutely awful the forecasts are in the Google weather app for my area. The forecast will show no rain, the radar view shows nothing, meanwhile it's pouring outside and every other app I check shows it. I know I can't expect it to be perfect, but being terribly wrong even one in ten times is enough to tarnish its reputation permanently.
Weather 2 doesn't seem to have been an ensemble model. Weather 3 is, so theoretically it can get more accurate outcomes by taking the probabilistic analysis of several models concurrently to determine the most likely weather conditions. 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.
WeatherNext 2 was based on the FGN architecture described in [1]. It was explicitly designed and trained to produce ensemble forecasts (it was trained in such a way that the output ensemble optimized a CRPS metrics). In fact, it was a set of 4 different model weights, each of which was seeded with a random noise vector to produce an array of 16 forecasts for a total of 64 ensemble members. WeatherNext 3 trimmed that down from 4 to 2 separate model weights to use.