I find Dark Sky to be the best forecasting tool for weather within the hour. It's almost always ahead of all the other apps in terms of the latest forecast.

I bought the app because of its hyperlocal forecasting, but it's been known to predict precipitation where there's none, and vice versa.

I wonder if it does better in some geographies than others (e.g. high pressure system areas where things are more stable)

hyperlocal is a joke, sorry to say it. Just because you can downscale your grid to a very small number doesnt mean good data. It just means you can do statistics and mathy stuff to interpolate. Everyone forecasts better in stable times such as a strong high pressure ridge. The tricky part is the edge areas between air masses, the transition zones. This is where all the juicy weather actually happens and it is the hardest to model

Totally agreed on it being a marketing term, not a real prediction improvement - it's essentially the same as any other app in terms of "will it rain" / etc.

But they do a much better job of notifying about changes based on where I physically am, instead of for the city / region as a whole. Other weather apps I've used don't differentiate between "rain falling now 50 miles away" and "rain falling on my head", even though the radar map clearly gives them that info at a much finer level of detail.

It's pretty accurate here, when it works. I'd guess at least 40% of the time it states that the local radar is down and refuses to give that kind of forecast.

One of the things I loved best about Wunderground was their prominent display of the textual SFD. Now it's gotten a lot more mainstream, and still have increasingly accurate forecasts, but the SFD link has been dropped from the forecast page for any particular area.

Now my source is directly from NWS page, which is really nice since forecaster terms can be clicked to bring up a definition. https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=LSX&issuedby=L...

I think Metcheck is the UK equivalent of this. To pick a few random page of turbo-nerdery (if you need a UK postcode to try, the National Museum of Computing is at MK3 6EB):

https://www.metcheck.com/WEATHER/ghx_charts.asp

https://www.metcheck.com/WEATHER/discussion.asp?DiscussionID...

https://www.metcheck.com/WEATHER/laundry_drying_times.asp

You can still find a link to it on the 10-day tab, but they did hide it.

In the Hudson Valley, we have (a) local weather nerd(s): https://hudsonvalleyweather.com .

It's especially nice for upcoming storms because they break down the region logically based on the relevant features (the river valleys and mountains), for instance: https://hudsonvalleyweather.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1...

Don't all those apps just get their data ultimately from the NWS?

Some commercial forecasters have a "wet bias" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_bias). They intentionally overestimate the odds for precipitation on the theory that people are happier if it doesn't rain when they were planning on rain than they would be if it rained when they did not expect it.

Yes this is truth to some degree. However, you dont know what you are getting with an app. If you go to read the official NWS page, the forecasts are human curated by a pro. Apps likely are just taking model output directly and feeding it to you as gospel.

If you really care about short-term weather forecasts, learn to read surface pressure charts and rainfall radar. It's not particularly difficult and it gives you a huge amount of additional information.

A summary forecast can only tell you so much, especially in changeable conditions and complex microclimates. Knowing the range of probable conditions is often much more useful than knowing the most probable condition.

How do you suggest really learning to read the surface pressure charts? I have gotten to the point I understand what I'm looking at, but can't really turn the factual knowledge of watching the highs and lows and winds moving around into real understanding & forecasting.

I made a website that displays hourly weather forecasts from the NWS: https://www.subraizada.com/weather/kbmg

You can make a version for your location here: https://bitbucket.org/subraizada3/weather-generator/src - it should just generate a single HTML file which you can host anywhere.

An older version also showed the 'normal' weather.gov forecast embedded to the left of the hourly forecast, you can get that if you copy/paste the deleted part of this commit back into the python file: https://bitbucket.org/subraizada3/weather-generator/commits/...

I get my weather straight from UK met page for that reason.

It has much more detail which helps as a cyclist, there is more than just average wind speed and temp.