About current trends in the development of meteorology, about who to blame for the wrong weather forecast and about the pointlessness of using your favorite weather applications.
The 'accuracy' of weather forecasts has already become the talk of the town among mobile app users. Citizens install the widget they like on their device, then scold it for inaccuracy, but do not delete it, 'because it is beautiful' … Why this happens, of course, we will not understand … But the question involuntarily arises, is it the fault of the application, or the weather all over the world 'shattered' so much that no one can predict her behavior. Let's figure out together how to get the most accurate forecast based on what is available.
How and why the weather is predicted
In addition to solving simple questions such as 'how not to be hit by thunder and lightning in the afternoon', weather forecasts help solve global problems of shipping, air traffic, agriculture and others. In the last century, developed countries seeded their territory with weather stations and began to accumulate statistics, process it and try to derive calculation formulas for long-term forecasts.
Typical Soviet weather station. Antennas and cabinets on legs
This is the whole essence of meteorology, which has survived to this day – science continues to develop, improving its tools of knowledge from year to year. Satellites, computers, supercomputers, international cooperation in the field of computing came to the aid of sensors and statistical conclusions.
Russian meteorological satellite 'Electro-L'
Information from sensors, satellites and radar systems (new technology) goes to computing centers. The very mathematical method of modeling comes down to constant 'cutting' the atmosphere into sectors (like a cake into pieces), observing the processes taking place in the 'pieces' and then introducing amendments to the general model. With each launch of new meteorological satellites and an increase in their resolution, the volume of processed data grows like a snowball, significantly outstripping the computing capabilities of specialized departments.
Main computing center of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia
The current weather forecasting accuracy of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia is 96% (according to the director of the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia Roman Vilfand in an interview with 'Top Secret' dated 02.02.2017), and the reasons for the errors and the dynamics of the industry development can be read in the article by Mikhail Andreyevich Tolstykh, Leading Researcher of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center This accuracy is valid for all countries that are engaged in their own development of modeling the global atmosphere (Russia, England, Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Australia, China and the United States). But it is valid only for the area that is of interest to the computing center itself; there is nowhere to get resources for accurate weather forecasting in other parts of the world. A simple conclusion follows from this – to use the weather forecast results only from a representative of the interested party (Russia in our case).
Weather forecast providers
Popular apps often have the option to choose a weather provider. If possible, always use the data of the Russian Hydrometeorological Center, the official application of which is on Google Play.
In second place is Yandex, with its Meteum technology. The bright page tells about Yandex forecasting technology, which boils down to collecting information from partners and the subsequent fight against inaccuracies. Bias are dealt with by correcting frequently recurring mistakes based on previous experience. Needless to say, if the partners' forecasting algorithms change, the final forecast from Yandex will be completely inadequate for some time? And, if on the page with the weather from Yandex in the browser you can select a source in manual mode (Hydrometeorological Center, Gismeteo, Weather.com), then we could not find how to do this in the mobile application.
In third place in terms of 'interest' in providing us with an accurate forecast is the Finnish company Foreca, solely due to its proximity to the European part of our country and the conclusions from this fact. Instead of Foreca, the source could be 'ECMWF' (European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), which is the center that develops the global atmosphere model used by Foreca for its forecasts.
Separately, it is worth mentioning Gismeteo and similar resources – the guys just take information from several sources (they don't have their own model) and make amendments to it. We are not told exactly what the amendments are, but the arithmetic average result from many sources has the right to life.
Other providers of forecasts for the inhabitants of our area do not matter. Their predictions will always be less accurate, and in case of technical failures in foreign computer networks, we will suffer in the first place. They can be displayed in the settings like this: GFS (Global Forecast System), Weather Underground, AccuWeather, Weather Channel, MetOffice, NOAA, Meteoprog, BBC and rp5. All these services and companies use American models or their 'daughters', which are poorly adapted to our natural conditions.
conclusions
I hope you have come to the same conclusion as I did, all these beautiful applications Elecont Weather, YoWindow and others are practically useless for use in Russia. I also hope I answered the question why the weather programs 'lie'. I would like to ask you if your favorite weather app has the Russian Hydrometeorological Center as a source? What is more important to you, a beautiful shell and errors in 2-5 ° C with the risk of being exposed to rain, or an ascetic application interface and an accurate weather forecast?