Interestingly, COVID played a big roll in that. Commercial aircraft often report back weather conditions. During COVID, the reduction in commercial air traffic drastically reduced air borne information collection. It just hasn’t seemed to return to its prior quality after that.

I personally find, I’ve had to learn how to read a weather map to get a good understanding of forecasts

> Commercial aircraft often report back weather conditions

Is this done via some automated system, or do pilots report it manually?

I’d be curious to read more about this - do weather companies have partnerships with airlines where they pay them to carry sensors?

Pretty sure it's all automated. Aircraft already have all of the necessary sensors onboard, so it's just a matter of transmitting it back to the ground.

> do weather companies have partnerships with airlines where they pay them to carry sensors?

Nearly all of the US's forecasts come from the NOAA. Nearly every other "weather company" is simply reformatting this data.

I can't remember exactly what video I watched on the topic, but these two may be interesting:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-wvE3iXT-A

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U

Hyperlocal forecasts are an aggregate of other weather sources and radar.

Things like the funding of NOAA or reallocation of funds within it can impact NOAA's ability to provide the data that is used to drive this (and other) weather and climate decisions. https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2024/04/30/noaas-budge...

It feels like quite the coincidence that hyperlocal weather prediction got worse after Dark Sky went away.

But, I don’t have any domain knowledge in this area. Perhaps, it is just more difficult due to climate change or other factors.

I've suspected, without any knowledge/evidence, that the increasing energy in the atmosphere has made all forecasts harder in recent years.

I did notice that Dark Sky's hyperlocal weather was getting bad in my area at the end. I wonder if it has anything to do with 5G frequency rollouts. I had seen some warnings about accurate weather predictions could be affected by it, but a quick search isn't showing any "Turns out 5G is/is not messing with our weather satellites" follow-up articles