Why doesn't the weather icon match the text description?

Weather forecasts aren't an exact science and it's very much up to interpretation what to show, sometimes the icon doesn't match the textual description.



For example, this day was shown as "Sunny" in DigiCal and on BBC, but with the text, "light rain throughout the day", and both are kind of true - there's probably enough sun in the afternoon to qualify for sunny, and enough rain before and after to declare it rainy.

It was probably better to show it with the "Sun & Rain" icon, but it's very much up to the weather providers we use to decide that.

If there are large discrepancies though between what we show and other sites, please contact us with the location and date and we'll compare it with other sites like AccuWeather, Weather Underground, Google, Yahoo and Forecast.io and check if it's an issue.


Weather forecast is still quite hard - for shorter terms, most sites tend to agree, but as you move further away from now, the results you get will divert rapidly.



One of the techniques to guess the accuracy of the predictions is to use slightly different start parameters and run the simulation multiple times, and as you can see, the butterfly effect starts out small, but after a while you'll get is a mess of lines.

We use multiple commercial sources ourselves to get as many lines as possible, and as no one discloses their exact source, it's quite impossible to pinpoint why a site says sunny while we predict rainy. But let us know if there are large differences, we might be able to figure out why and improve our predictions.