Why your phone weather app is no good

In much of New England, we saw hazy skies today as a result of smoke that has moved eastward from the western wildfires. Today would have been a completely sunny day, but sunshine did not really present itself. In fact, some could describe today as cloudy.

At mid-day, my phone weather app looked like this, indicating abundant sunshine.

However, when I went outside and took a photo of the sky, it looked like this:

While the sun is there, the haze and smoke that enveloped us today is very apparent. Why is there the disconnect between the weather app and what the sky actually looked like? The answer lies in the algorithms that the weather app uses. The app essentially uses an algorithm that is based on operational weather models in order to spit out its forecasts. However. the operational models don't account for smoke. Thus, the weather app does not know that their is smoke in the air, and it thinks that it is sunny. That is why we need real human being meteorologists.

One thing that was quite beautiful tonight was the sunset over the Adirondack mountains: