[hhh]

Since moving to the Netherlands I have found it surprising how bad short term forecasting is here. In the US I would get a notification 15 minutes before it rained and it would almost always be accurate within 5 minutes, and a notification when it was going to stop. I don’t really understand why it is so much worse here in this regard.

[gHA5]

Have you considered whether this is because of the local weather tendencies? I visited the Netherlands once in summer near Amsterdam, and there were short bursts of rain frequently throughout the day. I'd imagine weather patterns like that are not well represented in global weather apps lowering the prediction accuracy in such regions.

[lxgr]

As far as I can tell, it's largely a data or modeling problem.

Weather radars exist in most of Europe, including all of Western Europe. What's missing is somebody actually getting that data (which is not open in all countries) and feeding it into a short-term precipitation prediction model like Dark Sky (now Apple) does in a few regions.

Currently, in regions where it's not available, I just do that manually: Look the rain radar data for the last hour or so and extrapolate linearly based on wind direction. You'll miss rain that's just starting or stopping or sudden changes in wind direction, but it's much better than what many apps offer.

[troupo]

wat.

There are apps like Buienradar that literally track and predict rain block by block with high accuracy.

[hhh]

in my experience buienradar is never as accurate as whatever sauce the NWS provided that Apple uses for the weather app prediction in the US.

[troupo]

Granted, I've only used it for a bit while in the Netherlands, and it was accurate to the block and to the minute.

And every time when people would mention weather they would open the app to see if rain is coming in their particular location.

I think it's due to peculiarity of Dutch weather: you could have rain literally 100 meters away from you, but not where you're standing. So usual "weather in the general region of where you are" are probably wildly inaccurate