Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
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Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#2Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard that there are stupid legal reasons (lobbied for by the private sector) why government agencies such as the NOAA are prohibited from offering their own apps or services. If that’s true then I think it might be worth directing your anger there first and foremost.
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#3Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard that there are stupid legal reasons (lobbied for by the private sector) why government agencies such as the NOAA are prohibited from offering their own apps or services. If that’s true then I think it might be worth directing your anger there first and foremost.
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Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#4The iPhone had a barometer for 3 years before this article was written. I believe Dark Sky used the barometer to detect changes in air pressure.
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#5Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard that there are stupid legal reasons (lobbied for by the private sector) why government agencies such as the NOAA are prohibited from offering their own apps or services. If that’s true then I think it might be worth directing your anger there first and foremost.
I don't know about apps but I access my local NOAA weather[1] daily on the web...
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#6Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard that there are stupid legal reasons (lobbied for by the private sector) why government agencies such as the NOAA are prohibited from offering their own apps or services. If that’s true then I think it might be worth directing your anger there first and foremost.
I don't know about apps but I access my local NOAA weather[1] daily on the web... [1] https://www.weather.gov/ewx/
NOAA weather, on the web, has always worked for me. I've never used an app. The website is slightly klunky, but works. I get around town by bike, so it's helpful to have some indication of what I'm heading into.
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#7This seems to imply that there isn't any high-resolution precipitation data available that could provide these "minute-by-minute" forecasts, but that isn't true. The National Weather Service provides several radar products that give data with resolutions in the range of 500 m using their NEXRAD technology[0]. This allows for some pretty good estimates of when precipitation will start and end over the next hour or so. This kind of forecast product is called a precipitation nowcast. Other nations have similar systems.
If you use the NOAA desktop tool[1] to view the data from NEXRAD stations, you can compare to services like DarkSky and see that they are very likely using it without much editing.
The simplest nowcasts use optical flow techniques rather than meteorological modelling. On short time scales (less than an hour), these methods can give passable results. I built a tool[2] that pulls this NWS data from their Web server and gives you a nowcast.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexrad#Super_resolution
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#8This seems to imply that there isn't any high-resolution precipitation data available that could provide these "minute-by-minute" forecasts, but that isn't true. The National Weather Service provides several radar products that give data with resolutions in the range of 500 m using their NEXRAD technology[0]. This allows for some pretty good estimates of when precipitation will start and end over the next hour or so.…
Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience.
The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.
Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.
This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#9This seems to imply that there isn't any high-resolution precipitation data available that could provide these "minute-by-minute" forecasts, but that isn't true. The National Weather Service provides several radar products that give data with resolutions in the range of 500 m using their NEXRAD technology[0]. This allows for some pretty good estimates of when precipitation will start and end over the next hour or so.…
Any chance of this working in Canada? Even just right across the border?
Re: Cloudy with a Chance of Bullshit (2018)
#10This seems to imply that there isn't any high-resolution precipitation data available that could provide these "minute-by-minute" forecasts, but that isn't true. The National Weather Service provides several radar products that give data with resolutions in the range of 500 m using their NEXRAD technology[0]. This allows for some pretty good estimates of when precipitation will start and end over the next hour or so.…
Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience. The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to…
> It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything).
No, this is actually totally false. There is a world championship in computer-aided correspondence chess [1], and you won't get anywhere near the top ranks by having "enough modesty to just not do anything."