Thank you for the new wallpaper.

most weather sites (or apps, same thing) try to create soem sort of "easily digestible" forecast; i also experience some of your dissatisfaction, although maybe to a lesser degree.
the finnish metreological institute tends to present the facts to you without trying to "squeeze it all into an icon". difficult to read, but much better once you get used to it.
i was not trying to sell you "just another app", i did think about your particular requirement.
when you look at my weather conky, there's never just one icon, but a list of hourly changing conditions: temperature, wind, precipitation, and sun/cloud ratio.

i cannot, however, see how they could keep up the same granularity for ireland.

anyhow, i think maybe other sites also offer more granularity.

I imagine this would be closer to the mark. (attached)
I looked at those sites. They each have lovely icons, but the actual forecasting is crap.
yr.no: We're in the middle of storm Brian. High winds are due this morning/afternoon, and it's raining with no sun. They seem to think it's an ordinary day.

en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi: Anybody who would bravely forecast 5 sunny days in October (Do I read it right?) cannot be trusted. This one has the winds today a bit better.

Attached Images

 

^ yes well like i said i think weather forecasts should be created somewhere physically close.
i was just trying to give an example, how a detailed forecast works as opposed to a "single icon" forecast.
hopefully somebody in ireland is doing just that.

Sadly, only madmen go into business here; The home market is too small. You're exporting from day 1 just to stay alive, and costs aren't on your side.

Have you looked at darksky.net? They give precise forecasts, and more importantly, show precipitation radar map, so you can see the rain coming. They have a phone app, never used it myself though.

E.g., the forecast for Dublin: https://darksky.net/forecast/53.3498,-6.2603/, currently "Light rain stopping in 2 min., starting again 45 min. later.".

No, I haven't seen it before, but I looked at it.

I have a mistrust of sites based half a world away (The Excited States) trying to forecast Irish weather. Accuweather.com does it too. The first time I tried their apple tv app, it said "rain in 47 minutes", and it did rain - impressive. Then it says "rain in 11 minutes" and the day remains sunny & dry, or "No rain for the next 2 hours" while it's lashing rain. I might amuse myself with the darksky app.

It's definitely not right all the time. You won't get perfect accuracy, regardless of whether the source is local or foreign. I don't know about Ireland, but for Canada, radar data is available from a government website: http://weather.gc.ca/radar/index_e.html?id=wkr. In this case, there is no question of accuracy since it is showing you data from the past; it's generally good enough to see what's coming in next few hours.

that sounds a lot like something Finns would say about themeselves & their country, yet we have the finnish metereological institute.
so, i thought, maybe there's also an irish metereologicalinstitute?
http://www.met.ie/

Yes, and met.ie is right 80% of the time with it's "CYA" forecasts. CYA isn't good enough for me any more.
"Bright periods with scattered showers, heavy and thundery in places." = "It might rain and it might not; It might p*** rain, but it might never happen." That is CYA, not forecasting. (CYA = Cover Your A**)

again, sounds familiar.

i know i risk derailing this thread, but please consider this:
ireland is not the only country seeing a degradation in weather forecast quality.
"unpredictable" weather is one of the many markers of global, human-induced climate change.

there, i said it.

i hear a rumble in the distance... is that the first truckload of trolls coming this way?

The forecast tries to compress a lot of info into a couple of sentences; it can't ever be satisfactory.
The rainfall radar is more useful: http://www.met.ie/latest/rainfall_radar.asp

I'm skeptical of the idea that there has been a degradation in forecast quality. Alternate explanation: everything always seems better in "the good old days".

Ireland would be a difficult place to forecast the weather in any case, because it is coastal and near very turbulent, cold seas. There would be a lot of interaction caused by air vs. water temperatures, and by winds that can blow a long way, more-or-less all the time.

"Probability of Precipitation (POP)" is basically a calculation based on cloud density, and weather forecasting models work by dividing the space into little cells and calculating for each one. The more turbulent the weather is, the less accurate they will be.

Another strategy for very-short-term prediction is literally to place sensors all over the place, and then to notice which way the winds are blowing. If it's raining ten miles away with a ten-mile wind, it's very likely to be raining where you are in about an hour.

Therefore, since the weather's going to be crappy (again) outside, stay inside the pub!

Agreed.


Absolutely useless here. We can get summer rain clouds in 20% of the sky and get wet, or have cloud covered days where we never see the sun and they're dry. An old barometer works fairly good if you update it regularly.


The place (= the market) is too small.

Well for those that have the time and can afford pub prices:-)

Just left click on the globe and drag it/ rotate it, to where ya wanna it.

It aint a app. It aint got no clouds. It probably does not fit anyones needs. But fun to play with anyways.

https://earth.nullschool.net/#curren...46.927,-41.801

One can always sub a Irish latitude-longitude in the link I gave. It gives me a good view of the polar winds coming down into West Texas Tonight. I am going from 90F today for a high, to 40F in 24 hours.