Where Do Weather App Get Wyoming’s Forecasts?

Forecasting the weather has never been easy. Today's technology is a huge help, but it is still NOT very accurate.

Don't bother looking at your weather app for the 10-day forecast. Even figuring out what's going to happen for the next 5 days is hard, even with satellites and supercomputers.

Last winter was forecasted to be cold and wet. That never happened. Are we going to have a wet summer in Wyoming or a dry one? Meteorologists are afraid to come out and say for sure.

News reports often rely on the most exaggerated forecast to attract followers and clicks.

Weather apps obtain their data from computer models that are provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). More recently, some forecast apps have been trying AI-generated models.

Wyoming Apps rely on base forecasts, satellite imagery, and radar data provided by the NWS. Wyoming is served by local NWS forecast offices (including Riverton, Cheyenne, and Billings/Rapid City for northern areas), which continuously feed atmospheric data into national prediction models.

These are good tools, but they can't tell you what exactly is going to happen.

When you want to know the current temperature, the app will check the closest weather station near you, if it can. If not, it checks the next closest. That is why different apps show different temperatures.

Always use your weather app as a guide to the probabilities. The app will never show what will happen. Just what might happen within a percentage.

A 40% chance of rain means meteorologists are confident the conditions are right, and they expect rain to cover roughly 40% of the localized forecast area. It does not mean it will rain for 40% of the day, nor does it mean 40% of the region will definitely get wet.

As for long-term forecasts, those are just educated guesses based on past trends. There are competing forecasts out right now that show Wyoming will either have a wet summer or a dry one. The answer is not clear. We will just have to use our best estimates based on what has happened in the past under the current conditions.