[danielbarla]

I think part of the problem is not the accuracy of the forecast, but whether it's useful to you, or not.

As an example, they may forecast that 30% of the areas your city will report rain tomorrow. They may have an high level of confidence in this prediction (and verify it to be correct after the fact). It may still not be very useful to you, since the one outcome is so different to the other.

That said, I agree with your that the predictions should be presented in a more scientific manner. In fact, one irritating pattern is that rain probability and the predicted amount of rain sometimes get combined into a single percentage, which no longer represents neither the probability, nor the amount. It's some kind of weird combination of the two.

[magicalhippo]

Yeah, here they report rain just in mm. They might say 3-7.3mm, or they might say 0-4mm. Now I don't care too much about 2.5mm or 6.1mm, but I definitely care about the chance of more than light rain. For others, people with a gardens etc, the amount of water might matter more.

Just last Thursday they reported zero precipitation for the entire day, not a hint of rain. Yet we got 3 hours of medium-heavy showers in the afternoon... not a very uncommon combination. If I had known there was a 30% chance of showers, I would have packed my rain jacket.