They said it was going to rain..

[Trm1765]

Glad I don't have any faith in the weatherman on a Monday after a long weekend of working...

 

[Glassman]

Yep...rain clouds.

We don't have them either....

 

[justason]

Vacation week here "staycation"? We were the only boat on the lake today. Expect the same thru the week.

 

[SCSTWG]

There's a 50% chance it might rain. Gee, thanks for the heads up.

 

[farrelltravis]

You can have all of our rain!

 

[MOA_Chaser]

I stopped trusting them a long time ago. I'd rather trust a fart.

Too many times I would look at the forecast and see 80% chance of severe thunderstorms, etc. so we'd make other plans... only to have Saturday come and go at 90°F without a cloud in the sky.

This past Saturday we were supposed to have rain until 1pm, and then several hours of clear (20% chance) until we got more rain at 7-8pm. We thought we might go but it was overcast.... I even drove to the river in the car to see how high it was, etc. It started raining on the way home, and they changed the "forecast" to 70% chance ALL DAY. Hint: it's not a forecast if you wait to see what happens.

We ended up going out last night for a few hours because it was nice and sunny. It wasn't long but we haven't been out for weeks because of horrible weekend weather. I'm just going to keep trying to get the short trips in when I can instead of relying on decent weekend weather.

I saw an article a while ago that said that forecasts went to hell when they started relying on computer modeling. You used to have meteorologists local to you, who made a career of it and looked at radar and used their EXPERIENCE to do their best to predict what would happen. Now everything is computer modeled... and they said that if you take the exact same weather data and input it into the same modeling software on different computers with different processing speeds, CPUs, memory etc you'd get two different results. I believe it.

The national weather service is the funniest, though. They can't tell me if it's going to rain in three days, but they will come out and say that there will be 27 tropical storms and 7 hurricanes in a given year. LOL, yeah right...

 

[GTBRMC]

I use and trust www.intellicast.com

Their near-term forecasts, particularly the hourly detailed forecasts, have been bankable in the >1 year I have been using the site.

 

[MOA_Chaser]

I'll check that out.

The most accurate of the bunch that I've tried is weather underground. I really like how you can drag the hourly marker and see temperature, rain percentage, barometric pressure, etc etc for each hour of the day.

ETA: Actually I think that service and weather underground are the exact same thing, just rebranded.

 

[GTBRMC]

I'll check that out.

The most accurate of the bunch that I've tried is weather underground. I really like how you can drag the hourly marker and see temperature, rain percentage, barometric pressure, etc etc for each hour of the day.

ETA: Actually I think that service and weather underground are the exact same thing, just rebranded.

I thought the same, just looked it up. Apparently, they are actually from the same consortium behind the Weather Channel, as is wundergound.com. Now, don't everyone groan all at once about that, I found intellicast when I gave up on www.weather.com as I was tired of the ludicrous, exaggerated color scales on their maps, and all the other endless hype, plus the "What is this raccoon doing with that golf ball?" links.

From intellicast's About Us page http://www.intellicast.com/About/Default.aspx:

"Who is Intellicast.com? Since 1996, Intellicast.com has provided expert weather information to weather savvy users. With the most technically advanced site-specific weather forecasting system in the world today, the result of a multi-million dollar research project, Intellicast.com delivers site-specific forecasts for 60,000 sites in the U.S. and around the globe. From detailed local forecasts to hurricane tracks, severe weather warnings to international conditions, Intellicast.com has the active weather tools business professionals and outdoor enthusiast have come to rely on, consistently making us one of the top five weather sites on the Internet.

Who is The Weather Company?
The Weather Company (TWC) includes:

• Broadcast Division – The Weather Channel, as well as products for radio, newspapers, digital cable services, and interactive television
• Digital Division – weather.com, wunderground.com, intellicast.com and products for broadband and mobile platforms
• Professional Division – premier business-to-business weather services, particularly for the media, aviation, insurance and energy sectors

The Weather Company has become renowned for its ability to successfully combine the power of unparalleled industry knowledge, the experience of an unprecedented number of meteorologists and five state-of-the-art Global Forecast Centers. TWC’s internationally recognized experts in tropical weather, climatology, and severe weather apply their skills to cutting-edge technologies designed to constantly improve our abilities to forecast, detect and visualize the disruptive weather events that affect the safety and property of our clients and their customers. The Weather Company is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital. "

 

[MOA_Chaser]

Whatever it is, the "graph" user interface is genius, pure genius!