I’ve been using Weather Underground for years and really liked it, but for the last couple weeks it’s not working at all. I downloaded a couple of other apps, but don’t really like them. Do you know if any good ones?
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I use an app called Dark Sky on Android. Its not too bad. Ive found that they are all quite similar.
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Yeah its a real shame, WU used to be a great service but its a shell of what it formally was since its been purchased by IBM a couple years ago.
I just use weather.gov these days. Its not the prettiest but its by far the most accurate from my experience. They also have an “hourly weather forecast” page which very much resembles WU’s graphs if you tweak the settings on it a bit.
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I use MyRadar on Android. It’s basically a nice radar animation, but there’s a pull-down for projected temperature/precipitation timelines and thumbnail forecasts. You get notifications when rain is about to begin. … and it’s not enough.
Years ago, I wrote my own weather-digest Web page for a desktop Internet browser. You have to plug in your Zip code, and the site chooses a nearby airport for current readings and presents forecasts for your county. Save the ultimate URL. Then you don’t have to fiddle with location again. If you want finer control, you can pick your town from a list by state, and then you’ll receive a list of airports to choose from.
Sometimes my Web Hosting Provider gets peevish and doesn’t give me enough time to pull down all the NOAA documents I need behind the scenes. If the Web page times out, you may “retry” 20 or 30 times, and it will come up eventually.
At the bottom of all the forecasts, current conditions, and ephemera, there’s a series of links.
“Automatically track hourly observations” gives you a quarter-page display of conditions up to half an hour ago. This page refreshes automagically every five to ten minutes, so you can leave it up if you want and it will be nearly current. If your desktop shows a task bar, the tile for the browser shows the current temp. If your browser and operating system permit, you may even be able to specify a transparent background and hang the current-conditions page on your wallpaper. Save the URL.
“Get one-line report” generates a text fragment that you can include in eMail signatures. Once again, save the ultimate URL.
Here’s a sample of how to use it, showing what I got at Sheboygan, WI, this morning:
>wget "http://www.lacusveris.com/WX/OneLiner.shtml?County=WIC117&Lat=43.78&Lon=-87.85&State=WI&Station=KSBM&TZCode=C&WFO=MKX&Zone=WIZ052" -q -O-
64° — Wind S 7 mph — Sky overcast. Mist.
… which is just a blob of Unicode text, not a Web page at all.
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I use three different apps on my phone, each one has different forecasts so I can use them to make my own conclusion. Weather Bug (my default one, very easy to use), Weather Underground (still works OK for me), and Weather Pro (European product, uses Euro model for weather which gives a very different angle on the forecast sometimes).
On my computer I just use the ancient NOAA forecast page.
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I use NOAA Weather Unofficial for Android. There is a free and paid version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nstudio.weatherhere.free
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iOS user…
I use Weatherbug for Simplicity and Overall User Readability at a Glance.
I prefer Accuweather for Accuracy. It really seems to be accurate on precipitation starting and ending within 3-5 Minutes. That particular feature compelled me to pay the small ad removal fee I was so pleased.
I prefer Dark Sky when I want really good map details for radar and satellite imagery,
Hi-Def Radar is another good app for Radar and Satellite imagery but Dark Sky just seems to have more of a “This is Cool” factor.
-AO
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