hey folks. curious who you all rely on for your weather? i use NOAA but they aren’t very accurate. id like something thats more specific.
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I use NOAA, wunderground, and accuweather. Between the three of them, I can usually get relatively reliable forecasts.
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You might try Weather Underground. Especially useful if there’s a station in their network near you.
FWIW, I find NOAA to be pretty accurate, but they’re not usually as precise as others. They specialize in wide-region forecasting. Most of all other forecasting you see is just re-interpretation of NOAA data by locals with some more local knowledge.
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thats what I’ve heard. we do have a local weather station in town but its the NWS office in Caribou, 50 miles south of us, that interprets data and makes a forecast. i also watch weather from Edmunston, NB , Canada as they are right across the river from us and are usually more accurate just a pain to convert from C to F.
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I use several different phone apps which each use different sources for the weather.
- The built in iPhone or Google weather uses weather.com, it is good for a general forecast.
- WeatherPro uses the Euro model (MeteoGroup) so gives a different perspective which I check if something serious may be coming. It has a pinpoint location forecast by periods of day, including projected amount of rain, etc.
- Dark Sky is another good app which has its own model. It gives pinpoint weather for your location by the hour, also including projected amount of rain.
- Foreca is another model with its own app, pinpoint but not with amount of rain (which I really appreciate for Surround spraying).
- WeatherBug is another app which is less useful as less pinpoint info, not sure which model they use but it is not one of the above I don’t think.
None of these are directly using NOAA but I think it is a major input to all of the US-based models?
PS hey here is a fun site to see which model is winning for your location: https://www.forecastadvisor.com
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I probably go to wunderground.com more often, but it has to do with making long range and well as sometimes ‘the rest of the day’ type decisions where I need to know if it’s actually going to dip below freezing, or what the probability of getting rained out doing outdoor work is. Weather Underground, like Accuweather and The Weather Channel (what I refer to as the ‘global warming channel’) are accurate because they CHANGE/UPDATE often…what I mean is if they’re giving 50% chance of rain, they’re going to hurry and raise that to 100% after it’s raining (rather than admit they weren’t very good a few hours earlier).
So, I use an amalgam of what the various ones have to say if it’s important, rather than relying on any one of them. (In the 24-36 hour time frame Accuweather and WeatherBug seem to hit it more often)
NOAA
weatherforyou.com
msn.com
and the Old Farmer’s Almanac (which is often the most accurate on long range forecasts).
(Sorry, the logos just popped up, I didn’t mean to highlight or advertise for them)
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That is interesting if they use the Euro for forecasting here in the US…that data is hard to get…unless you spend some cash. I’ll have to try that app… The Euro generally is the superior model…like almost always…and has been for years… Anyone can access their general maps but to get the detailed stuff is no go.
I mainly use Meteostar (enter 4 digit airport code near where you are look) , tropical tidbits (mostly for precip maps… and local NWS…
The wunderground.com website is a new one to me. I like it! I found a weather station just down the road from where I live and had no clue one was so close!
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I link to a series of NOAA reports on my Web site:
Once you get done with choosing a Zip code and an airport, you can save the link to get back to your forecasts day after day.
There are two links at very end of the forecast: One is to a short current weather page that refreshes, and one is to a one-line status that you can use in an eMail signature.
If the forecast times out, just keep refreshing. It’ll eventually catch up.
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They actually use a blend of Euro and US, but I don’t think many other forecasts for the US do much with the Euro model. Here is a page describing how they blend different models (this is called an ensemble forecast):
Hey it looks like Foreca also uses the Euro model in their ensemble:
DarkSky looks to use no Euro in the US but also does more than just ensemble (blending of various government forecasts), it sounds like they run their own prediction algorithm from the raw data.
https://darksky.net/dev/docs/sources
We as users really need to do a blend of these blends to get an idea of what might be coming. If a bunch of apps/sites are all giving the same forecast you can be pretty sure what is going to happen. But if they are all saying different things then all bets are off.
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I’d be interested in seeing how the forecast goes up against say the 5 or 10 days NWS forecast for a location… I think accuwx/weather.com/etc…lots of those just grab GFS numbers and maybe tweak them a little for the location…there has got to be some algo or something they use…
obvioulsy if you have a cold pocket in your backyard, no weather model is going to show that 
I’ve used Meteociel for Euro weather maps (French site) for years, but it’s not specific to any one location. Just a broad view of N America…out to 10 days…
http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/ecmwf.php?ech=72&mode=1&map=9&type=0&archive=0
Another really cool site…but a little annoying to use is Utah Climate Center… you can find weather data for 1000’s of locations back to when they started collecting data. I think locally ive downloaded data for close to a 100 years locally… you can either view it in .txt format or have it emailed to you in a .csv format…then you can just drop that into excel and do what you want with the data… be warned that it can be missing lots of readings for various dates… so you might have to try to check another location…and you have to zoom in on the stations and click and click what you want to dl…
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Ha! The real answer is that I can’t rely on anybody for weather info.
I use Weather.com as a starting point but even though the data they use is from only 5 or 10 miles from my location, the temperatures on my property are way off of what they predict. On the average my temps are 9 to 10 degrees colder than their prediction. But I can be as much as 17 degrees colder and 10 degrees warmer than their predicted lows.
I’ve created a spreadsheet that keeps running track of my average variance from their prediction and then predicts what my low temps will be. But to be safe, I might be 3 or 4 degrees colder, so I also calculate that. In other words I start with their prediction (eg., low of 20), calculate my predicted low based on an average (say an average of 9 and therefore a prediction of 11) but then I also calculate an extreme low of about 4 degrees below that (so, 7).
I don’t usually hit the extreme low but it helps me see when I have to keep an eye out for cold danger.
I have max/min thermometers at several spots on my acre and the lows can differ by 5 or 10 degrees even within my property, though there is consistency as to which areas of the property are colder and which are warmer.
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