The Europeans are putting big money into weather forecasting, "The goal is to be able to provide, by 2025, reliable forecasts up to two weeks in advance."

https://www.zdnet.com/article/europes-big-weather-supercompu...

As far as I know other than this model upgrade, there are no major investment being made in American weather forecasting.

How far from that goal are they at the moment?

Judging by last week's forecasts for my region: pretty far off. Sudden rain in the regions of 10mm/m² and a lot of clouds when sunny weather was predicted. The exact opposite happened as well. Temperatures were off by 5-8°C, too.

All of this for same day forecasts, not even 2 days in advance.

rain is pretty hard to predict though. I guess what matters the most is if you can reliably predict major events like heavy storms rather than if you will get a bit wet later today.

You might be onto something... met.no has been more accurate than the usual domestic weather forecasts for as long as I can remember. Literally, it can be hailing outside, and thundering, and NOAA says like 20% chance of rain and sunny, where met.no might say 70% chance of storms, cloudy, etc...

https://www.met.no/en/free-meteorological-data

User facing interface: https://www.yr.no/?spr=eng

They have a very cool iOS app too: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yr-no/id490989206

Might be, but ECMWF just has many more observations so it will be hard to compete.

I use ECMWF but never even knew what was different - def more reliable where I am for cloud / sun. Haven’t paid attention enough to see if it’s wind predictions are better

Some differences are covered here: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/download/attachments/53517138/P... (2016)

I once had lunch with a senior meteorologist at the WMO, who was (5 years ago) convinced that the European model was 5 to 10 years ahead of the US model and that it would be hard for them to catch up. Not sure if that's still the case.