Do modern day weather tools bring joy or dissatisfaction?

glightning

Sitting here in the garden watching the sky, and I can’t help but wonder if our access to today’s modern tools (Sat images, radar, models, forecast discussions, etc) actually bring us any satisfaction? Or do they just increase disappointment and discontentment?

if you go back to pre-internet days, your source of weather information was largely the daily forecast on the TV or radio and that’s about it.

It was usually vague enough that you didn’t place your hopes on a certain weather event occurring. You basically took the weather as it is…. A night time lightning storm out of the blue in a just magic. And when it came to snow, you usually just woke up to it white outside.

Today, we can watch what goes on over in England in almost real time. We see us missing the heat during hot spells. See the Sat images showing Ireland under cloud when the UK isn’t. See the storms firing in other places but nothing on the way for you. See it snowing elsewhere, but just rain or dryness for you.

These are all things you didn’t care about in the past. Because you likely never heard about them unless it made the news. All you knew was that Spain should be hotter and sunnier than here for example. And you just took the local weather for what it is.

The weather data on the internet has increased our tendency to be hope casters… Wishing events to occur which our not under our control, are chaotic in nature, and no model no matter how huge and fine resolution it’s dataset is will be able to predict what will happen with certainty.

So the question is, does the weather info we get from the internet actually bring us satisfaction, or does it just increase our likelihood to be dissatisfied with our weather?

koura

I Hope when Met Eireann installs the new Radar system at Shannon Airport the weather forecast Improves!!!!.

All we ask for is 24hr notice, even 12hr. Today we had thunder storm with heavy showers, no mention on last nights weather forecast.

glightning

Radar will improve short term forecasts and severe weather alerts because they detect current precipitation (and things like wind shear) so the new radar system will be useful for that. Hopefully also increase resolution so we see more detail in things like thunderstorm cells.

But the new radar won't improve things like next day weather forecasting since this is largely down to how well the mesoscale (fine resolution) weather models predict what will happen. And this is where the devil is in the detail. You would need almost infinite resolution to be able to model the atmosphere exactly.

squonk

Back in I think it was January 1990 there was an outbreak of countrywide snow I think, apart from north Clare where I lived. I was a teenager then and was well up for some snow fun but because we didn’t get anything I missed out. I remember it being cold and grey but not a bit fell from the sky. I remember it being quite frustrating but don’t remember catching the weather forecasts around then. Nowadays thanks to weather apps and the internet and advances in forecasting I’d have much more information to go in and be less disappointed. Mind you I also expect I’d not have gotten tge data off school either as it turns out. So it’s a blessing and a curse! Later on I was based in Skerries and became well acquainted with the Isle Of Mann shadow as tech had improved. I was still in my late 20s and early 30s and used to go nuts monitoring apps during thunderstorms and snow events so I could check if we were going to get anything.

Tims has rolled on and I’m back in North Clare at the moment. My attitude to apps and weather forums like this has changed. I still monitor events like thunderstorms and snow events a lot but nowadays I don’t take tfem as gospel. We are still dealing with nature and it’ll still surprise us. Like today. The radars were showing some intense showers to my east yet an intense cell sprung up over my area that the tech didn’t pick up on til later. Likewise last August a severely intense lightening storm bubbled up literally right over me that was spectacular and a once in a lifetime event. So I’m still surprised. We don’t yet have the pinpoint accuracy where you can input an eircode and get a minute by minute summary of the next 24 hours. So based on they I know sometimes I’ll win, sometimes I’ll loose in the weather lottery. It’s just that now the technology gives me some more insight into why things are happening the way they are.