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AccuWeather.com weather widget inaccurate..

O

ohcrap

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 12, 2005
548
0
I haven't seen the sun all day. Not only that, but I can hear thunder, see lightning, and judging by the very dark shade of the clouds around my house, I can pretty much say it's damn sure about to start pouring.

What I'm getting at is that this widget has shown nothing but sunshine all day and all night tonight. The temperatures seem to be close, but that's about it.

Just curious if anyone else noticed any inaccuracy with this widget.
 
Currently it seems to be OK for me. Sometimes there can be some odd inaccuracies. For example in one city it'll show a sun and in another city a moon, when the two cities are within 70-100 miles of each other. Although I think it was near sunset. I've heard that it all depends on what the weather station reads, sometimes they can be slightly different that what you see.

But having stormy weather but the widget shows sunny isn't that close at all. Could be a bug or something. Wait a while to see if it fixes itself :)
 
How close are you to the weather station that it's using? And have you tried Command-R to refresh the information it's getting.

On the only post-Tiger evening that we had lightning, it took about 30 minutes for the accuweather widget to change to the lightning icon.
 
Adjust the location by ZIP code. Somehow during setup, my widgets (and family members all emailed me about it too) became Minneapolis, Maryland or something to that effect instead of Minneapolis, MN. By entering my ZIP code that alleviated that trouble.
 
My fave is the pic for Sunday. How the hell does the sun rain? No clouds.
 

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Re-inputting the ZIP didn't make a difference, but Command+R to refresh did the trick. Never knew about that shortcut, thanks!

P.S. Cool effect for the refresh. It seems every other day a new graphical effect pops up in OS X and surprises me. :D

Maybe I'm just easily amused... :rolleyes:
 
yeah sometimes it can be a bit off. according to the widget i should have seen rain and thunder storms for the past two days but not a drop fell. she's not very smart but she sure is pretty to look at.
 
Unbelievably inaccurate

For me, it's at least 10-15 degrees wrong every single day!
Around 2pm, as the actual temperature changes, the prediction from the 5 day bar underneath increases with each realtime update.
Today, just like every other day, it forecast around 85 and by 4.30pm it had moved to 99!
It has my correct zip and I can't understand why it should be so wrong every day?
 
In Toronto, Apple is consistently in disagreement with every other weather service

Batt said:
Well, I gotta say mine has been and is very accurate.
Click to expand...

The problem with AccuWeather (the source of the widget weather's info) is not that it is always inaccurate, necessarily. It's that it is an outlier. At least here in Toronto, pretty much all of the other weather services say one thing (including Environment Canada), and they are all generally in agreement. Whereas AccuWeather often says something entirely different, especially when it comes to precipitation, etc. Particularly their 'lows' are consistently way, way higher than anybody else's, which makes me think that they have a private definition of 'overnight' that nobody else is using.

In such situations, I tend not to trust the outlier. And yet this is what Apple has saddled me with by default. Kind of dumb from a Toronto perspective.
 
Batt said:
Maybe your weather, much like this thread, is three years old:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Badda-boomp!

Funny how these ancient threads get dredged up almost randomly.

FWIW, the problems with all weather forecasting applications are the (1) limited number of reporting sites, and (2) the limitations created by the forecasting zones used by the NWS. The sites are scattered widely, and the zones quite large, which leads to generalizations which don't always hold for any given point on the planet. Oh, and some of the software doesn't even parse the limited data correctly, so they just plain get it wrong.
 
Superdrive said:
Adjust the location by ZIP code. Somehow during setup, my widgets (and family members all emailed me about it too) became Minneapolis, Maryland or something to that effect instead of Minneapolis, MN. By entering my ZIP code that alleviated that trouble.
Click to expand...

Agreed, a similar thing happened to me too.
 
Doubloon said:
The problem with AccuWeather (the source of the widget weather's info) is not that it is always inaccurate, necessarily. It's that it is an outlier. At least here in Toronto, pretty much all of the other weather services say one thing (including Environment Canada), and they are all generally in agreement. Whereas AccuWeather often says something entirely different, especially when it comes to precipitation, etc. Particularly their 'lows' are consistently way, way higher than anybody else's, which makes me think that they have a private definition of 'overnight' that nobody else is using.

In such situations, I tend not to trust the outlier. And yet this is what Apple has saddled me with by default. Kind of dumb from a Toronto perspective.
Click to expand...

Odds are very good that you're falling victim less so to Apple forcing AccuWeather on you and more so to AccuWeather being overly America-centric.

There are three Toronto, USAs... probably none really worth a tourism trip, but they do exist! One in Ohio, one in Kansas and one in South Dakota. Type "Toronto" into the location box and you'll see these three options pop up... and ONLY these three.
What you have to do to make AccuWeather even remotely accurate is enter your location as exactly this, minus the quotes of course:
"Toronto, Canada(Ontario)"

You'll notice that it still denies any knowledge of this location, an oversight which is downright insulting to Canada's largest city! Regardless, it will now start pulling the right location data.

Apple forcing AccuWeather (and IntelliScreen forcing The Weather Underground on my iPhone lockscreen) is a horrible thing to do to the users.
 
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