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I apriciate it's hard to predict the weather, especially on an island' but The UK Met Office app seems to be struggling to predict the rain over the next 24 hours these days. I used to find it quite reliable for short term predictions but I've missed a couple of opportunities to get out on the bike recently when they've predicted rain the following morning and it's turned out fine.
I get the feeling since they've come under fire for missing Storm and flooding events in the past few years they forecast on the safe side just in case. There seems to be forever yellow waning of flooding and nothing happens.
I just wondered where other forum members get their short term forecasts when planning a ride etc?
Yr.no
Ventusky
Windfinder, xc weather and MWIS.
Pick which ever forecast looks best or look out of the window and cross your fingers.
Rain radar helps to take a look at for a guess as the next few hours.
I use the met and xc weather and get a general gist.
Windy + metoffice.
windy let’s you compare 5 forecasts for the same location. If they all agree then seems fairly robust. If they don’t agree the I pick the one that looks best.
+ rainfall radar. Real-time view of what’s happening and what’s coming next. Can often time a run or quick ride on weekends like this between waves.
used to love Dark Sky but moved exclusively to ios so now i use Accuweather which is pretty goo.
Don't all the other companies get their info from the Met Office?
Met Office or Metcheck, then choose whichever looks best. Or MWIS for the increasingly rare trips involving proper hills
+1 for the rainfall radar. Worked well for me today.
Don’t all the other companies get their info from the Met Office?
I think met office charge 3rd parties, so unlikely.
most get the free stuff from ECWMF or the GFS model from the yanks. BBC jumped ship from met office last year.
Met Office for forecast of days ahead, https://www.wunderground.com/ for on the day forecast and real time rain radar "Wundermap."
I'm currently using AccuWeather.
Ventusky is good as you can view a number of weather models or even make your own assessment based in the weather fronts.
Met Office is generally crap. It uses the same forecast for huge areas of the country.
MWIS is great for the areas it covers as there is still a manual input, it's not just computer analysis and prediction.
WeatherProHD which is the weather app for MeteoGroup, which the BBC now use instead of the Met Office. To get hourly forecasts requires a subscription, but I find it’s worth it. The precipitation radar is excellent and the forecasts are very accurate.
I do use Dark Skies on my phone, but that’s only on iOS, and I’m not sure how much longer it’ll remain working, as more of its functionality is absorbed into the main Weather App. That’s still not there yet as far as usability is concerned, so I’m waiting to see what happens. There are others as others have mentioned.
Rain alarm is a good free rain radar app
The precipitation radar is excellent
All uk sites will use the same radar data. There is only one network, owned and run by the met office and EA…
It's better than their police franchise.
For what it's worth I use the met Office app it's been pretty accurate for me.
Just move to East Lancashire. You don’t need a weather app. Just assume it’ll be raining and probably really, really windy
I've found that the most up to date forecast can be found just by typing 'your location weather' into Google, where your location is the place you want the forecast for. It seems to be updated more often than the others and you can get hyperlocal.
Plan for rain. One may always fold an umbrella or stow a cagoule. Mrs P has at least 6 weather apps and neither are as efficient as cagoule + shades.
Farming Today for the win!
As a regular MWIS user I have found it has been quite off the mark this year, perhaps that has been the result of some unstable weather patterns, however it has predicted a lot of armageddon type hill days that turned out to be very different in reality IMO. Interestingly when you cross reference with the Met hill forecasts they can be wildly opposing forecasts - I tend to lean to MWIS normally but this year has been a bit of an eye opener
I sometimes use Theyr https://www.theyr.com/app.asp for sea kayaking.
I have been more lazy recently and tend to use the bbc and it’s pretty good on rainfall. I know they were moving away from Met Office data but I am not sure what happened.
Most apps use the global weather models sold by the US. The Met Office is one of the best forecasters in the world and they are obviously UK focused. However, if you only want to see the chance of rain in the next few hours then a rain radar app is best. And as it happens the Met Office app (not so much the website) I find has one of the best radar functions too.
I use to pay for meteogroup but I don’t think it was any more accurate
BBC and met offices don’t state the number of mms of rain expected. YR does predict the amount of rain. So it’s more my go to
Met Office is generally crap. It uses the same forecast for huge areas of the country.
This is just not true. The met office models are actually specific to UK conditions whereas the other widely available models aren't and don't take coastal or relief factors into account adequately.
I read an interesting thing from a meteorologist who said that the kind of granularity people demand these days like hour by hour forecasts just isn't supported by the models but if it isn't provided people will switch to a different provider. I suspect things like the precipitation amounts yr.no offer probably fall into this category too.
Interestingly when you cross reference with the Met hill forecasts they can be wildly opposing forecasts – I tend to lean to MWIS normally but this year has been a bit of an eye opener
The met office mountain area forecasts are just plain weird. They often contradict their own specific mountain forecasts. I find the mountain area forecasts to be of very little use but the specific ones in conjunction with MWIS usually gives a pretty good idea.
The Where2go function on the Meteoblue app is very useful for getting a general picture of where might be dry.
Dp
Dark Sky is now called Hyperlocal on Android
It's a fairly ad-heavy and cluttered UI but it still has the 1 hour radar rain forecast graph which is pretty accurate IME and very useful
2/3 days ahead I just use the Google weather app and the two normally agree quite well
Thanks for all the replies. Very interesting.
I'm going to play with Windy for a while. I've had it on the phone for a while but didn't realise you could switch between the forecasts.
The Meteogram Android app will let you geek out to your heart's content with weather - you can construct your own forecast chart picking which data you get from which source (some are free, some need a sub) - so you can overlay yr's rainfall totals with the met office's precipitation probability etc etc etc
But as mentioned above, find a few forecasts and compare them (MeteoBlue app has a multi model view) and if they're consistent you can sort of accept their predictions, if they diverge then it's anyone's guess.
I've found Shadow Weather on Android to get the rain prediction right more often than the Met over the last few months. Has radar too.
Another vote for windy.com here.
Also for marine stuff I use the Meteo Consult Marine app.
I use the Met Office, Rain today, and the iOS weather app. between them you get a pretty good picture of what's going on
This is Scotland, you will get wet, the only real need for a forecast is to know which combination of the 32 different possible directions you will get wet from at the same time!
The RNKI ( who I volunteer for) know a bit about weather.
They use XE Weather as the bench mark on phones and weather stations via WeatherLink
MWIS akways seems very pessimistic. I'm not sure I've ever seen one of their forecasts without the word "appalling" in it.
I tend to use the BBC, Met Office, Met chece and MWIS and just pick my favourite.
Met check and Yr.no here