[londons_explore]

Weather forecasts are so hard for a user to evaluate... Are you going to check it every day and remember how many days it was right or wrong?

Please can weather providers just publish a headline statistic of "Our rain/no rain one day ahead forecast is right 85% of the time. That is better than NOAA (80%), Met Office (72%) and weather.com (65%)."

[carabiner]

This is kind of the purpose of the "50% chance of rain" things. The process is called calibration and is usually done with linear regression, and it means that in historical forecasts, the actual outcome was rain 50% of the time. Surface precip is notoriously hard to predict, so this is what we've got right now.

[londons_explore]

But they should publish that... And then compare that figure to their competitors... To demonstrate to their users that their service is actually better, not just has a shinier UI...

[tiagod]

Would be nice to have some extra error information. Like a probability for a number of mm precipitation buckets.

[nikisweeting]

Atmo built their business on beating their competitors on a particular ranking metric that does exactly as you describe. I discussed it with the founder but am not sure how much of that convo was public info so I hope they post it here.

[namibj]

On part that's what ensembles are about: they run like 20 or so simulations of the near future, randomizing the start values and simulation parameters within the range of uncertainty, and get one potential future per simulation out of the process.

A 30% rain chance every hour of the entire afternoon until sunset tends to be less actionable than "85% chance of a 50~80 minute rain shower during the afternoon, unclear when, but likely a bit longer if it'd start very late", as one can often adapt around such, for example by scheduling the homework to get done "wherever it's raining, at the latest so it'll be finished by dinner time", spending the dry time with outdoor physical activity that doesn't care about wet ground (but getting wet from above isn't nice).