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Weather radar is useless

lonzek
over 1 year ago

Hi guys, 

Maybe I'm missing something, but when I open weather glance/widget and switch to radar all I can see is the past, which doesn't make any sense to me, as we could see how the weather was like already.

It would be more useful to show the raining predictions few hours ahead.

Regards

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to linsguilherme

    I’ve figured out the difference in behaviours. There are 4 overlays; precipitation, cloud, temperature and wind.

    Temperature and wind appear to work correctly (3 hourly), but precipitation and cloud coverage only provides historic 15min or 30 min intervals.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to B1nny

    I wonder, maybe it depends on the location and weather source used per location?

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to B1nny

    Same with my 955Solar

    Android in Germany

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    I'd argue it's working exactly as expected. Radar is a picture of present conditions. Any future predictions are created through complex computations, which I wouldn't expect Garmin to have access to.

    I suppose it'd be nice to have more frequent updates, like every 5 minutes, but I'd guess these limits are based on the frequency of updates to the weather services Garmin subscribes to. Mine shows 10 minute intervals, which is pretty good.

    The fact that it shows any radar animation at all (on a watch!) is rather useful. If I can see a storm's movement over the past hour, then I'm quite capable of making my own prediction of where it'll be in the next 10-20 minutes. Any app that pretends to show future radar imagery for hours ahead is really just guessing.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Duffman19

    As I mentioned earlier, the temperature and wind radar overlays provide 3 hourly updates over a 12 hour period, currently; 13:00, 16:00, 19:00, 22:00, 01:00. So these are indeed future.

    It appears to be only precipitation and cloud coverage that are historic over the previous hour. Not very useful for us who aren’t proficient in meteorology.

    Clarity regarding the intended behaviour of this feature would be useful and would prevent the need to speculate.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to B1nny

    Temp and wind are much easier and forgiving to forecast. You'll notice they are just wide swaths of color. Creating a radar-like image for future precipitation would require a degree of precision that is nearly impossible.

    For instance, Apple's weather app now uses the old DarkSky modeling to create future imagery, but it looks really smudgy and is far from accurate. I use an app called MyRadar which is regarded as one of the more accurate radar apps and it does not provide any sort of future radar imagery. It does give a chart based prediction of probably precipitation.

    Garmin also provides a 12-hour trend for temp and rain percentage on a separate screen, which is really about as good as you can get.