A rather intense line of thunderstorms followed by roughly an hour or so of moderate to light rain moved through the Madison, WI area this morning, Sunday, July 14, 2024. Looking at Windy's ECMWF forecast strip, I see that during that time there was no forecasted rain through the period. In fact, as far back as the forecast strip goes, the sky is shown to be clear and no chance of rain.

It would be one thing if this was a somewhat isolated incident, but that would be far from reality. It's more often wrong than right. Looking back, the Meteoblue model seems more accurate, but that may just be a fluke. Overall, I have found myself increasingly questioning the accuracy of this app on almost all forecast models.

So, what gives here? Has there been a global breakdown in all the forecasting models? I get that weather forecasting is an imprecise science, but I think near term forecasts should be highly accurate, or at least they used to be. What happened?

So far so good. Reinstalled the app and battery drain is only 0.3% for over half the day now, and was about that low for the remainder of yesterday after reinstallation.

Thank you!

@idefix37 - Sorry if I misread your comment, but when noting that there were thunderstorms in the Chicago area, I thought you were confirming what I was saying. If you backed up the radar, those were the ones that blasted through the Madison, WI area but had no forcast data indicating they were coming through Madison. I believed @Gkikas-LGPZ's to confirm that only afternoon thunderstorms were predicted, implying that there was, in fact, no forcasted event for the morning during which severe thunderstorms and about an hour-long rain event occured.

Point is, most models completely missed the large weather system that came through, and those that did pretty grossly underestimated its scale in terms of deliverable precipitation.

New version that just dropped. 45.0.x? Today is 2025-04-02 so the one that just dropped.

On my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, the Windy app is not respecting the OneUI Nav bar at the bottom of the screen, so the app is appearing partially below the Home, Back, and Recent Apps nav bar.

So, although you've all confirmed this anomaly, no one has any thoughts on the breakdown of all but maybe one forecasting model? It makes no sense to me to have to look back and see which model predicted most accurately, or is currently correct, since the "winning" model might change every day. I don't want to play guessing games with weather forecasting. Over at least the coming 24 hours, and hopefully over the coming 48 to 72 hours, I believe the models should be pretty accurate. Further, when the situation on the ground differs from the model data, I would expect the model to be self-correcting, but that, too, seems far from the truth.

Again, I wish I could say this was just a one-off curiosity, but it's not. The models are more wrong than right these days, and it makes weather awareness more of a crap-shoot than a reliable expectation. The ECMWF model is reputed to be one of the most globally accurate and seems to be the Windy default. Not only does it get precipitation forecasting wrong, I frequently see temperature variances of up to 10°F in its forecasts.

I understand this isn't a failing of Windy. Windy is just depicting the weather as predicted by the various models. My overarching question is WHY are the models so far off these days? And by "these days" I actually mean over the past many months. I've had this sense that the weather information I've been getting from Windy is more wrong than right for at least the past six months.

New version that just dropped. 45.0.x? Today is 2025-04-02 so the one that just dropped.

On my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, the Windy app is not respecting the OneUI Nav bar at the bottom of the screen, so the app is appearing partially below the Home, Back, and Recent Apps nav bar.

@idefix37 - Sorry if I misread your comment, but when noting that there were thunderstorms in the Chicago area, I thought you were confirming what I was saying. If you backed up the radar, those were the ones that blasted through the Madison, WI area but had no forcast data indicating they were coming through Madison. I believed @Gkikas-LGPZ's to confirm that only afternoon thunderstorms were predicted, implying that there was, in fact, no forcasted event for the morning during which severe thunderstorms and about an hour-long rain event occured.

Point is, most models completely missed the large weather system that came through, and those that did pretty grossly underestimated its scale in terms of deliverable precipitation.

So, although you've all confirmed this anomaly, no one has any thoughts on the breakdown of all but maybe one forecasting model? It makes no sense to me to have to look back and see which model predicted most accurately, or is currently correct, since the "winning" model might change every day. I don't want to play guessing games with weather forecasting. Over at least the coming 24 hours, and hopefully over the coming 48 to 72 hours, I believe the models should be pretty accurate. Further, when the situation on the ground differs from the model data, I would expect the model to be self-correcting, but that, too, seems far from the truth.

Again, I wish I could say this was just a one-off curiosity, but it's not. The models are more wrong than right these days, and it makes weather awareness more of a crap-shoot than a reliable expectation. The ECMWF model is reputed to be one of the most globally accurate and seems to be the Windy default. Not only does it get precipitation forecasting wrong, I frequently see temperature variances of up to 10°F in its forecasts.

I understand this isn't a failing of Windy. Windy is just depicting the weather as predicted by the various models. My overarching question is WHY are the models so far off these days? And by "these days" I actually mean over the past many months. I've had this sense that the weather information I've been getting from Windy is more wrong than right for at least the past six months.

A rather intense line of thunderstorms followed by roughly an hour or so of moderate to light rain moved through the Madison, WI area this morning, Sunday, July 14, 2024. Looking at Windy's ECMWF forecast strip, I see that during that time there was no forecasted rain through the period. In fact, as far back as the forecast strip goes, the sky is shown to be clear and no chance of rain.

It would be one thing if this was a somewhat isolated incident, but that would be far from reality. It's more often wrong than right. Looking back, the Meteoblue model seems more accurate, but that may just be a fluke. Overall, I have found myself increasingly questioning the accuracy of this app on almost all forecast models.

So, what gives here? Has there been a global breakdown in all the forecasting models? I get that weather forecasting is an imprecise science, but I think near term forecasts should be highly accurate, or at least they used to be. What happened?

So far so good. Reinstalled the app and battery drain is only 0.3% for over half the day now, and was about that low for the remainder of yesterday after reinstallation.

Thank you!

Seven days following the original post on this issue, and I've come here looking to see why my battery keeps getting crushed. Yes, I see Windy at the top of the heap of battery wasters. I've also deleted the home screen widgets like the OP, but Windy remains at the top of the heap. I will need to uninstall the app until something can be done about this.

Suty - please be sure to post when it's safe to jump back into the pool. I love Windy as an outstanding weather app, and have subscribed for years, but I cannot tolerate hearing my phone say "Charge your phone!" only to find Windy has crushed the battery again.

Thank you.

In the attached screenshot, you can see that the "Precip. Type" layer is toggled ON, yet it does not appear on the Quick Menu. If I click on the words "Precip. Type" (i.e., not on the toggle button), the map changes to that layer AND the icon suddenly appears on the Quick Menu. If I select another layer, say Weather Radar, the Precip. Type icon disappears from the Quick Menu. Note that throughout all of this clicking around, the toggle for Precip. Type has always been ON.

It would appear, then, that the relationship between the toggle and the Quick Menu is broken. Could you please fix this. The precipitation type is an important layer for me and getting to it without fuss would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Why is there no way to distinguish between rain, snow, ice, etc, on the radar displays? Most radars color code rain green, snow blue, ice pink, etc. Why is that not the case in Windy's live radar? Especially when traveling under changing conditions (and just about any other time, for that matter), it would be very helpful to see where the transitions are occurring. It's a limitation of Windy I've never understood. Is there some configuration setting somewhere that I've missed that would turn on color coding on the live radar? Otherwise, when in the world will this standard-everywhere-else feature come to Windy?