Next-hour precipitation notifications from Apple's Weather app

Apple says that in iOS 15, the Weather app will have next-hour precipitation notifications, at least in the US, UK, and Ireland.

Next-hour precipitation notifications
Get a notification when rain, snow, hail, or sleet is about to start or stop.

I’ve turned this on for both my location and four other locations, and in the past few weeks, I can think of only two notifications from the app in that time, both for another location. But there has definitely been plenty of weather here—we’ve even had flood alerts from the National Weather Service, and CARROT Weather has been sending me precipitation notifications based on the same Dark Sky data that Apple uses.

Have you turned on notifications in Settings > Weather > Notifications, and configured them in the Weather app, and if so, are you getting notifications regularly?

Yes, in Chicago, I get precipitation notifications from both CARROT and Weather.app nearly simultaneously.

Same here in MA. I get notifications in both the weather app and the Dark Sky app. (If the stock weather app remains this reliable I will turn off Dark Sky notifications.)

What’s weird about that is that Chicago is one of my random other locations, and I’ve gotten no notifications for it in the past few weeks.

Tonya turned on notifications in Weather a few weeks ago too and she has gotten only a few as well. But this morning, she got one for our location but I didn’t. So there’s something going on here, but I can’t tell what. It may be focused on my iPhone, or my account in some way.

I nearly bought Dark Sky a year ago but held off when I learned Apple bought it. I went from iOS 12 to iOS 15 with my new phone and was a little disappointed about the level of detail, specifically in wind speed. It is a huge improvement over the iOS 12 Weather app though. The Weather Channel app used to show that hourly which I used for planning bike rides.

Diane

Oh, I see. Apple Weather only works with iOS, not iPadOS.

Although I have other cities configured in Weather, I don’t have notifications turned on for anything but my current location. In Settings > Location Services > Weather I also have “Always” and “Precise Location” turned on.

I’ve been getting the notifications from the Apple Weather app here in the metropolitan Vancouver, BC, area and they have actually helped us. (We needed to move some large pieces of wood and keep them dry). They seemed quite accurate but we might have been lucky. We get the notifications a couple times a day (and it’s been pretty rainy here lately).

This is hilarious—of the four random locations I created around North America, Chicago (mentioned earlier) was one, and another is next door to you in Burnaby, BC (since that’s where my son lives).

In theory, I should be getting the same notifications you are, then, but it doesn’t sound like I am. I do see one notification from yesterday from Burnaby, but that’s it. This weekend, the pace of notifications has picked up, so I’ve gotten four or five total between all my locations, including a couple for the local location.

Still, I’m surprised there are so few notifications. CARROT Weather doesn’t have any trouble letting me know what’s happening with precipitation, and Dark Sky didn’t before. Interestingly, Dark Sky lets you choose the level of precipitation necessary to initiate a notification, whereas Apple’s Weather app doesn’t, so I wonder what level it’s set to internally (Any, Light, Moderate, Heavy).

Ha, I live in Burnaby actually. My last notification was yesterday at 8:22 AM here: I got “Light Rain Soon. Expected to start at your location at 8:29 AM”. The false precision is kinda funny. Today has been heavy rains and winds (all highways into the Vancouver area are shut down!) and not one notification all day. The rain has stopped from time to time. I think we were just lucky before or maybe false negatives are much more common than false positives.

Yeah, the precip notifications are… entertaining at best. The predictions in the app itself seem to be much better. But I’m on the verge of switching off the notifications because they’re incorrect as often as they are correct. Maybe I’ll wait for snow season (any minute now…),

Precise precipitation start and end times have long been a feature of Dark Sky. It knows your exact location, plus the location, speed and direction of the leading and following edges of precipitation (see “Precipitation Radar” on their web site.) I’ve expected to see this incorporated into Apple Weather since their purchase of Dark Sky.

Something must be going on. I got a couple of rain notifications yesterday with zero rain. Today I woke up, opened the weather app to see today had a 100% chance of rain, but the hour by hour showed nothing (it wasn’t supposed to rain today and it did not).

I even force-quit Weather and restarted it with the same issue.

Diane

Yeah, our son just mentioned that Vancouver is effectively cut off by road now due to flooding.

I’m beginning to think that Weather’s notifications are generally wonky, which is not to say that they may not be accurate for some people, but they’re certainly not predictable for many of us.