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Previous: Lost cat ad | Main | Next: Elevator directional signal
May 13, 2004 12:02 AM
Broken: Yahoo! Weather forecast
Mark Nelson writes:
Here is a not so uncommon occurrence when you check your local weather at Yahoo! Weather. You will often find that today's high will be a lower temperature then the current temperature. It can be argued that the high temperature is the forcast, but it still doesn't make much sense. If the forecast is wrong, shouldn't you update it?
I don't agree that this is broken. Imagine that they forecasted a 20% chance of rain, and it's raining right now. Was the forecast wrong? No, because probabilistic predictions do not refer to individual events, only to large classes of events. Therefore, even if "today's expected high temp" is exceeded, it's not really wrong in the way you might think.
I agree with Roy, this is not broken. However, what is broken is that the design doesn't clarify if the pictured conditions ('fair' in this case) are current (not useful) or forecasted (more useful).
Note broken. Another way of looking it is that the forecast is X (right or wrong). It's an expected value. Reality could be different.
Not broken, and you probably *don't* want to update your "forecast" to reflect current conditions ... because anyone then looking at the "forecasted" figure could very well get a false impression that the forecasting is very accurate, and *that* would be broken!
Let's see, so you are watching the weather segment during your local morning news program and the weather person explains that the high for today will be 63 degrees f. In the very next breath he/she says the current temp is 66 degrees f. I'm going with BROKEN.
Not broken. Actually useful.
Mainly because if I see a forecast for 65 low 85 high, and the current temperature is 55 (and this happened today) I know I can probably safely discount the high temperature. If they adjust one end of the forecast based on current conditions, and not the other end, this makes the information even more misleading.
I say it's broken.
The wording should be "Predicted high" and "Predicted low". As it is, it can be misinterpreted as actual high and low values.
Fixing the wording won't make it any less useful.
IMHO, it's broken because while it's true that it's just a forcast, the display still leads to confusion. The temperature forcast should be a range anyway, how do they know if it's going to be exactly 63 degrees? Showing something like "mid-60's" would actually be more accurate.
I look at Death Valley a lot. The present temperature coincides with Mercury's and is 10-15 degrees cooler than D V would be at that time.
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Previous: Lost cat ad | Main | Next: Elevator directional signal
Related dumbness: The local (New Orleans) station WWL-TV calls its forecast "FutureCast," as if "future" isn't implied by "forecast"...
Posted by: daisy at May 13, 2004 12:49 PM