Weather Underground Mini-Fail


For weather I usually rely on my Weatherbug iPad app.  But Weatherbug didn’t seem to recognize Pullman, Washington.  That’s the home of Washington State University where the Stanford baseball team is supposed to be playing right now.  I suspected a weather delay.

“No problem,” I thought.  “I’ll just use the Weather Underground on my Mac.”  And here’s what I saw:

Radar for Pullman, Washington Weather Underground Mini-Fail

Radar for Pullman, Washington

Yeah, that’s Pullman just to the right of that yellow-red area.  Nasty weather.

But as long as I was there, I thought I’d explore some of the new features of the site.  One really slick item is the new ten-day forecast:

Ten Day Forecast Weather Underground Mini-Fail

Ten Day Forecast (click image for a larger version)

You can drag across the ten-day forecast and get specific details on what looks like an hour-by-hour basis.  Which leads to the Weather Underground mini-fail.  When I dragged to the far left (which should have been right now) I saw this:

Probability Of Rain Weather Underground Mini-Fail

Probability Of Rain

That circled number is the probability of rain — right now. Excuse me? 98%? Weather Underground needs to add a “look out the window” function.

Seriously, this is a great website.  I’m happy to poke a little fun at them.


About Tony Lima

Tony Lima has been working with technology, economic modeling, forecasting, and market research for 40 years. His background makes him uniquely qualified to navigate this varied landscape. Begin with his education: B.S. in chemical engineering from M.I.T. , M.B.A. from Harvard, Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. His day job was professor of economics at California State University, East Bay. He retired in 2016 to devote his time to consulting and writing. But he has found time to: write (eight books and over 100 articles ranging from wine economics to detailed analyses of meta-language code generators) consult with companies ranging from Microsoft to CEDEX keep his expertise up-to-date, constantly reading and sorting through the avalanche of information available daily maintain three blogs: Wine Research, Wine Economics, and Economic Policy Local policy analysis: Los Altos Politico.com

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