re: Why is the weather forecast suddenly so bad

From my limited knowledge, it is my understanding that offshore weather reports are severely limited because of the lack of data collection. Besides some buoys, rigs, and ships, there isnt anything to collect the date needed to predict weather like we have on land.

On land, data is collected nonstop pretty much everywhere across the country. A weather system could go 100 miles on land here and have thousands of points of data collected. That same system could move 100 miles over the ocean and not one piece of data would be collected.

Iirc, this was explained in a class I had years ago by a guy that worked at NOAA