HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — In an unusual move, China’s national weather service is warning that its forecasting may lose some precision due to Russia’s economic problems, including a depreciation in the ruble.

“Our weather forecasts might be less accurate due to the recent fall in Russian ruble,” China’s National Meteorological Center (NMC) said on its official Weibo microblogging account late last week.

The NMC explained that it relies on Russian meteorologists to provide data that “serve as a reference” for its own prognostications, as weather from China’s northern neighbor has a big impact on what happens in China.

The resulting outcry on Chinese social media ranged from accusing the NMC of dreaming up excuses to questioning whether the Weibo post was a joke.

In fact, the reaction was large enough to merit another statement from the weather agency late Monday night: The criticism “was truly undeserved,” the NMC wrote. “We admit we sometimes can be inaccurate, and that’s why we don’t have to look for an irrelevant excuse that you wouldn’t even be able to believe.”

The weakened ruble and other economic problems afflicting Russia has caused Moscow to roll back spending on its weather forecasting, and this “decrease in funding has caused a lack of meteorological observation data, affecting our data forecasts,” the NMC said.

For whatever it’s worth, the NMC’s Tuesday forecast for Beijing called for a high of 12 degrees Celsius (about 54 degrees Fahrenheit) and a low of minus 2 Celsius (about 28 Fahrenheit), identical to what the U.S. website Weather Underground predicted.