Most everyone here agrees that the forecasts are not accurate often enough. But some perspective and info on the technology.

We really have it good. Forecasts are much better now than even 10 years ago. Once you learn how to read weather reports, weather patterns, and match that up with experience, you can get about 80-90 percent most of the time. Just about as good as you can get without having access to military type priority systems. The "technology" issue isn't so much with gathering the data. There are thousands of weather stations, from official NOAA sites to backyard weather stations (weather wunderground). The problem is gathering all that data, in real time, putting it into a weather model predictor, and then getting out a forecast. The data is only as good as the predicting model it is entered into. There are some private sources, a few mentioned here and more available at www.ilakeerie.com (links page). But in the end the result is the technology can't always give you a fast enough forecast to keep up with changes. Sometimes the forecasts are dead on up to 2-3 days out. Sometimes they are wrong before they are even sent out, although that's pretty rare nowadays. It all depends on the weather pattern itself. There are still situations where even the best model predictors will get it wrong on a short term - say within 2-6 hours. The best systems update the incoming data as often as possible and also draw data from different sources. Hope that helps you cope with the issue.