The Weather Forecast Is a Guess at This Point

I’m writing this while it’s actively raining outside.

Not a drizzle, not “light scattered showers,” actual rain. The kind where the sky is completely gray, everything looks gloomy, and I just know that my commute home will be shit.

I’m currently on Google looking at the weather for Mt. Laurel, NJ. It says bright, clear, and sunny, with zero mention of rain.

I guess Mother Nature didn’t get the memo?

This isn’t even a five-day forecast missing the mark. This is the day of. How the hell do you get the forecast wrong on the day of?

This used to be a rarity, but it seems like it’s happening all the time now.

Nothing’s worse than making plans to do stuff outside because the forecast said “clear”, then not even an hour later getting rained on like an asshole because the people whose job it is to predict the weather somehow dropped the ball yet again.

What the hell is going on with weather forecasting now? It didn’t used to be like this. Yeah, forecasts used to miss sometimes, but it was usually by a little. Maybe it rains an hour earlier than expected, maybe it’s a little warmer or colder than they said. Whatever, that’s normal.

Now it feels like they’re just completely wrong. Even worse, you can check ten different sources and get ten extremely different forecasts. You check Google, you check another app, you look at your local news station, you pull up the radar, and somehow all of them disagree with each other and reality at the same time.

We have more data than ever, and yet at the same time we have less accuracy than ever.

That makes absolutely no sense.

We’ve got satellites, radar, sensors everywhere, entire systems dedicated to tracking storms across the planet. We can watch a hurricane form off the coast of Africa and track it all the way across the ocean, but we can’t figure out if it’s going to rain this afternoon?

How does that even work?

Every time you bring this up, people rush to the defense of the meteorologists and start reaching for all kinds of bullshit explanations.

Global warming is often used as a scapegoat for the decrease in quality of forecasting.

Alright, maybe the weather itself is changing. I can’t say I haven’t noticed a difference myself over the years, with Philly having hotter summers and milder winters.

But that doesn’t explain why forecasting is worse. The patterns may have changed, but the laws of physics didn’t change. Air still moves the same way. Pressure systems still exist. The weather changing doesn’t suddenly make us worse at predicting it.

If anything, changing conditions should mean we invest more into getting better at predicting it, not just shrug and accept that it’s inaccurate now.

People also love to point to the funding cuts that NOAA and the National Weather Service were hit with. While I agree that these are two agencies which shouldn’t have had their funding cut, forecasts were already getting bad well before the budget cuts came. You can’t just pin this entire problem on Trump and call it a day.

So what actually changed? Something clearly did. Somewhere along the line, it feels like forecasting went from being a science to just a suggestion.

Part of me wonders if we’ve over-automated everything. Like instead of actual meteorologists making judgment calls, we’re just feeding data into models and whatever comes out gets pushed straight to apps with no context, adjustment, or human checks. Did we outsource meteorology to ChatGPT?

The one explanation I’ve heard that at least comes close to making sense is the idea that 5G interferes with weather tracking equipment. That’s not just me pulling conspiracies out of my ass, there have been studies on this that show 5G frequencies may interfere with weather forecasting.

I’m not a scientist, so I can’t say for sure that this is the case. But at least it’s an attempt to explain why the inputs might be off. That’s more than just blaming “the climate” or politics and calling it a day. Funny how the one explanation that actually tries to make sense barely gets talked about.

This is the kind of thing that pisses me off the most. It’s not even so much that the forecasts are wrong as it is that nobody seems interested in figuring out why it’s wrong. We just accept it now like it’s a normal part of life, right alongside death and taxes. “Oh the forecast missed again.” Yeah, no shit, it always misses. We’ve lowered our expectations to the point where being wrong is normal.

At this point, checking the weather is just like checking a horoscope. It might be right, it might not, but I’m definitely not making serious decisions based on it. Which is insane, because that’s literally the entire purpose.

If the forecast can’t reliably tell you whether it’s going to rain today, then what exactly are we funding, and what exactly are all these apps even for?

Either fix it, or stop pretending it works.

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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