I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
Because we have tons of ground-level sensors, but not a lot in the upper layers of the atmosphere, I think?
Why is this important? Weather processes are usually modelled as a set of differential equations, and you want to know the border conditions in order to solve them and obtain the state of the entire atmosphere. The atmosphere has two boundaries: the lower, which is the planet’s surface, and the upper, which is where the atmosphere ends. And since we don’t seem to have a lot of data from the upper layers, it reduces the quality of all predictions.