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WeatherNext 3

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Re: WeatherNext 3

#51

Post by firesteelrain »

exhilaration wrote: post #43
bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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?

Nexrad? NOAA?

Re: WeatherNext 3

#52

Post by rtpg »

Reading through the paper and...

This seems to be a bit of "we're throwing a _bunch_ of inputs into this machine learning set and then pulling out outputs". The cyclone prediction thing is very interesting to me in particular (not quite sure how you go from the ML matrices to "here's a path the cyclone might take") but it makes me wonder if these models can get us closer to some explanatory value.

I imagine a lot of predictive sciences are ultimately about mixing together a bunch of inputs to attempt to decipher some output. Do we end up being able to take stuff from here and figure out some new ideas about modelling the climate as a whole?

Re: WeatherNext 3

#53

Post by notatoad »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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.

does google actually use their own models in consumer products? i'm not an android user, but the weather widget in the google search results for my area always seems to be attributed to weather.com.

Re: WeatherNext 3

#54

Post by eclipticplane »

altcognito wrote: post #34
bilsbie wrote: post #31

It’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.

> 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).

Re: WeatherNext 3

#55

Post by yzmtf2008 »

mkroman wrote: post #30
hankbond wrote: post #13

The 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 being UTC and init times are both meteorological standards, so I'm not sure why those are problems.

Re: WeatherNext 3

#56

Post by clumsysmurf »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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.

Same here, if its raining Windy.com radar will always show it, but often Google Weather does not show it, despite saying its updated "now". Sometimes it seems to be a tiling issue, where there will be a blob of rain on the map but cut off at some boundary over the forecast area.

Re: WeatherNext 3

#57

Post by counters »

rtpg wrote: post #49
bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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…

> I've heard some commentary in the past that 5G interferes with data measurements heavily used for weather forecasts (something about satellite measurements?)

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.

Re: WeatherNext 3

#58

Post by thedub »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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.

At one point they did release the most accurate weather model by far, but it actually decreased usage compared to showing a weather forecast more skewed towards "happy" temperatures and weather. I'm certain this is still the case and likely explains why you are seeing a more positive (no rain) version of the weather.

Re: WeatherNext 3

#59

Post by MPSimmons »

counters wrote: post #50
MPSimmons wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Awesome comment, thanks for the info!

Re: WeatherNext 3

#60

Post by jedberg »

bastawhiz wrote: post #27

It'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.

It's because the current administration cut NOAAs funding, which means fewer weather balloons, which means less data to make a prediction. And it means less real time updates.

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.

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