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Weather widget precipitation/cloud/wind map, only past data

1970512 over 1 year ago

In the weather widget, the animated map showing precipitation data only shows past data. It has no utility to predict the weather in the coming hours. It is not that useful when you want to plan an activity..

What do you think ? Having forecast data through an update would be great

0 Marcin over 1 year ago

I think seeing precipitation data for recent past is pretty useful for predicting the rain in the near future. It's usually the rain clouds development and motion that I care about.

Weather forecasts have typically more latency and less precision. I have access to a service which shows radar-based precipitation map every 10 minutes and then future predictions every 10 minutes. It's good, but typically you can see a clear discontinuity between historical data (truth) and future predictions (estimates), likely because of computational delay. Also the predictions are more blurry and often more static, because they somehow need to include uncertainty.

I know no weather forecast that can beat seeing where the rain was 15 and 30 minutes ago, esp. if you can also look around a compare it to the current situation you experience. Of course any extrapolation that a human could do could be automated, but I guess it's not that easy to do it both quickly and at scale.

Not that I would mind adding some predictions after the recent historical data, but I also would not hold my breath that it will be much better than what you can visually extrapolate :-)