I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
Because they’ve never been able to do that…
When they say “50% chance of rain”, it doesn’t meant there’s a 50/50 chance it rains where you’re located
It’s that for the broadcast area, about half is gonna get rain.
Unless I misunderstood what you said, that’s not it either. 50% chance of rain means exactly that: according to their forecast models, there is a 50% change it will rain. Snopes did a writeup of this.
Key word “in the given forecast area”.
The statement “there’s a 40% chance of rain at any given point at any given time in the forecast area/period” is an average over both area and time.
Many different actual distributions of rain could result in that average, including a 100% chance of it raining 100% of the time in 40% of the are or a 40% chance of it raining in 100% of the time in 100% of the area, and a 100% chance of it raining 40% of the time in 100% of the area. Real distributions are typically messier than that.
Can’t trust snopes any more
Says who? And what evidence?
yeah, never mind the references in the article where they pointed out the evidence for their conclusions. :P
Isn’t that virtually the same thing as a 50% chance of rain at my position though?
Yeah…
And it wants a definitive answer for the exact location they’re standing in…
Which isn’t possible
No, because clouds—and weather patterns in general—are not necessarily uniform across an area.
Yeah, kind of. It’s going to rain. That’s the forecast. That rain will effect half of the area in their forecast range.
That’s not how that works
No it doesn’t, it means that under those conditions, about 50% of the times it has rained in that area