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Best (accurate) weather app?

ps
I've just looked at the home screen and the weather is sunny periods.

It's actually pouring with rain again!
 
I find the Met Office app very good for short-term forecasts. Longer forecasts are more difficult by their very nature. I'm obsessed by the weather and have my own weather station. :)
 
ks.234 said:
Weather forecasting in North Wales: if you can’t see the mountains, it’s raining. If you can see the mountains, it’s about to.
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There is a similar saying down my way, except it's Beachy Head. We don't have mountains on the South Coast.
 
I still tend to use the BBC weather. Rainfall in Moray has always been difficult to forecast due to the rainshadow from Cairngorms and Grampians if the weather comes anywhere between SE and SW. Rain from NE are often triggered by the rising terrain as you move inland and amounts are difficult to predict.

I often use the Met office rainfall radar to help decide if the washing goes out on the line or has to come in.

We have Davis Vantage Vue weather station and find it very useful in deciding what to wear when I go out on the bike or putting out the washing.
 
As the computers get more powerful the accuracy of the forecast seems to reduce. They can’t even manage 48 hours without changing their minds. I had been waiting for a couple of dry days the week before last to spray preservative on my new shed, on the Wednesday they forecast Friday and Saturday to be cloudy but dry and revised it the next day to say it would rain on the Friday.
 
Another vote for xcweather, I do a lot of kite flying, and the wind forecast especially is pretty close.

like most forecasts, a day or two ahead is normally ok, any further than that you can see the sequence of weather changes, but not believe the timing.

raintoday is good for short term stuff, shows the last three hours but you can see rain moving towards you and make your own judgement. Good for cycling !
 
I need good predictive (for planning) and next-day hourly for my sport and I now use XCWeather for wind forecast and actuals (but obviously site limited), Met Office for more general local forecasts and Netweather.tv is by far the best for rainfall radar images.

I'm told by those who work in the industry there are only two good sources for the data so you'll see a lot of the on-line forecasts converge. The Met Office predictive models have a very high resolution compared to others and hence tend to be better, besides I know people who work on them and they've explained why they work better for the UK.

CHE
 
IME, the most accurate publicly available UK weather model for the next 24 hours or so is RASP 2km:
http://rasp.stratus.org.uk/index.php/rasptable-desktop

It's crazy how good this forecast is compared to what was available 10 or 20 years ago. However, it's aimed at soaring pilots (sailplanes, hang gliders and paragliders).

Generally, if you want accuracy, it helps to compare different weather forecast models. If all models give the same forecast, you can be more confident. The more the models deviate, the greater the uncertainty.

There are many apps and websites but most free apps use the USA's GFS model (27km grid). There is no sense to compare forecasts from the same model as only the presentation and speed of updating varies. xcweather as mentioned above uses GFS. The site also incorporates reports from airfields which allow you to compare forecast and actual.

Then there's the excellent Metoffice model which is probably the best all round choice for most people in the UK. The Metoffice app is great and worth the couple of quid for the ad free version. I occasionally look at the mountain forecasts and the synoptic charts (esp. the fax charts). The Metoffice has the advantage of being prepared / checked by human experts.

Another good one is Meteoblue.com which is a spin off from the university of Basel and runs a custom model.

Different weather models can be compared here:
https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi..._tmp2&HH=84&ARCHIV=0&ZOOM=0&PERIOD=&WMO=26038

Finally, a general understanding and observation of the weather helps. Isolated showers and thunderstorms are inherently difficult to predict for any given location. Well defined fronts vary only in the timing. High pressure can produce the same weather for days. With complex lows, almost anything could happen. Also, local effects caused by the sea or hills are rarely reflected in most forecasts and local knowledge helps here.
 
tiggers said:
They're all inaccurate as forecasting the weather is difficult in the UK. The best website was the one backed by the Norwegian weather service (name escapes me now), but they got de-funded a few years ago. Some how the Norwegians had a massively more accurate forecast for the UK than anyone else.
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YR.no, i use it daily along with BBC and a couple of others.
 

Loved St Kitts and Nevis, we wandered round the Marriott but the off licence across the road was more enticing.

Could do with a month there now.
 
I compare Metoffice with BBC. In my area the Metoffice is the most positive forecast, so I tend to go with that one.:D:D

The one that comes with the Apple phone isn’t accurate enough.
 
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