If you live in the New England area and have Comcast, I actually find their weather more accurate than anyone else on TV or the net.

My issue is that we get predictions of rain... and it does rain... but it doesn't rain when I'm riding to or from work.

This keeps so many commuters off their game.

My workaround is to carry a rain poncho. If it starts to rain, I'll stop, take 5 minutes to put the poncho on. Start riding again and then it will stop raining... never fails.

I find this website to be essential whether I am training or commuting. It's mainly the wind-speed and direction that gets my attention. Obvs. this link is for Phoenix, customize for your needs.

http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/laun...=KPHX&state=AZ

This. I use Wunderground.com and look at their wundermap. Put it in motion, and once you do that for a couple weeks you will get a really good feel for when the rain will be passing by.

I'm a weather observer and I can tell forecasts are quite accurate, but people pick whatever they want from it and complain afterwards.

Well, not just that, i have a feeling people are not informed very well about the limitations of the weather forecasting. Naturally, those who get wet will complain.

Most weather forecasts have rather coarse spatial resolution, they can't resolve small scale processes like local rain events very well.
So, it may be raining, but few kilometers away. Also rain droplets may evaporate before they reach the ground. Etcetera etcetera. Weather radars provide huge improvement, but normally they are used only for monitoring current conditions or very short scale forecasts.
Also, forecasting is easier for some areas than for the others. Prediction skill for the North Atlantic European shore may be better than somewhere in South Pacific where weather/climate is normally more wild.
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The more money is invested in high performance computing and weather observation programs the better weather prediction will be. :rolleyes:

Exactly. The weather forecasts are pretty good in a general way, but nothing beats just looking at the radar at what's coming at you.

Nowadays I don't decide on whether or not to ride based on the weather but I do adjust my departure times. Within two or three hours you can be nearly 100% accurate with the radar and those helpful storm tracks.

The verbal reports aren't worth a thing. I go to the local weather.gov report and click on the radar images. I find that the base reflectivity scan seems to correlate to rain the best. In addition to looking at the local radar I also look at the regional radar. Put the image on loop to get an animation that shows the conditions for the past hour or so and you can get an idea of which direction and how fast anything is coming at you.