just because it knows where you are, doesn’t mean it has measurement equipment there.

Darksky could do it back in the day more or less. you’d get messages that it would rain in about 15 minutes and stop in the next 30.

Thing is, precep maps don’t work everywhere. You’re probably in a location like me where a thick front rolling through will almost always bring rain. If you get into warmer tropical climates, rainclouds will just poof out of nowhere and drop rain on your ass while other crazy fronts will pass over with nothing but some dark clouds.

I am a pilot and flight instructor. I took a full year of meteorology at ERAU. Most weather forecast products presented to the general public are completely worthless, and we really should run “AccuWeather” out of business.

The temperature number they show you for what it is “now” was probably taken by the AWOS at the closest municipal airport to your location. If you’ve ever noticed like a car GPS reporting weather from three towns over and not the one you’re in right now, it’s because the town you’re in right now doesn’t have a nearby airport or it doesn’t have an AWOS.

10-day forecasts are generated by tarot cards and have no basis in reality. Actual aviation weather forecasts seldom reach out beyond 24 hours.

Your best bet for getting a complete understanding of the weather is to start by looking at the GOES satellite imagery, ie actually look at the Earth from geosynchronous orbit and look at the clouds. You know those maps with the blue lines with triangles on them and red lines with half circles and big blue Hs and big red Ls? Those are called Prognostic charts, those map where high and low pressure systems and fronts are. Look at one of those and compare them to the satellite images. Then look at Doppler radar imagery, which shows where precipitation is. Look at what it’s been doing for the last few hours, and then you can get a good sense of generally what the weather is going to do in the next few hours. Beyond that, not even God knows because the prick hasn’t decided yet.

Since people are sharing their weather apps, I use Breezy Weather! Multiple sources, lots of info, FOSS, what’s not to like. I tried multiple sources untill I found one that was the most accurate for me.

Weather prediction at point locations is extremely challenging to get right because we simply can’t observe and make predictions for every single square inch of the earth. Many weather models are run on grids with boxes about the size of a few kilometers at the smallest scale, which means that any physical process in the atmosphere that is the size of that box or smaller won’t be represented well by the model.

Specifically on your point about clouds passing over your location, cloud and precipitation formation is even more challenging. Clouds and precipitation form due to atmospheric processes ranging from hundreds of kilometers all the way down to micrometers, which practically means the weather models are making an educated guess (albeit a very good one that is informed by scientific research) about when and where clouds will form. And when a model does predict a cloud, it will cover an entire grid box.

Finally, I saw you made a comment about how machine learning should improve forecasts, and in fact it does! But the weather community is still working on data driven models (as opposed to models that solve physical atmospheric equations), and most of them are run by private companies so their output is not free. As these data driven models get better, it may be possible that they will be able to make predictions at scales less than a kilometer.

You must be 14. Science doesn’t work like that.