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Comment by pxlpshr | Hacker News Reader

I find Dark Sky to be the best forecasting tool for weather within the hour. It's almost always ahead of all the other apps in terms of the latest forecast.

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I bought the app because of its hyperlocal forecasting, but it's been known to predict precipitation where there's none, and vice versa.

I wonder if it does better in some geographies than others (e.g. high pressure system areas where things are more stable)

hyperlocal is a joke, sorry to say it. Just because you can downscale your grid to a very small number doesnt mean good data. It just means you can do statistics and mathy stuff to interpolate. Everyone forecasts better in stable times such as a strong high pressure ridge. The tricky part is the edge areas between air masses, the transition zones. This is where all the juicy weather actually happens and it is the hardest to model

Totally agreed on it being a marketing term, not a real prediction improvement - it's essentially the same as any other app in terms of "will it rain" / etc.

But they do a much better job of notifying about changes based on where I physically am, instead of for the city / region as a whole. Other weather apps I've used don't differentiate between "rain falling now 50 miles away" and "rain falling on my head", even though the radar map clearly gives them that info at a much finer level of detail.

It's pretty accurate here, when it works. I'd guess at least 40% of the time it states that the local radar is down and refuses to give that kind of forecast.

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