Summer is long gone and Fall is fleeting. Winter is coming and it's time to up your mobile weather game so that you know exactly what's going to hit you and when.
When I first started tracking weather on my iPhone, it became quickly apparent that the native Weather app, while pretty, wasn't really going to give me all the information I needed. Where was the radar? Where was the detailed forecast? Where was the severe weather information (crucial when you've got a hurricane spinning off the coast)? For a while I used The Weather Channel app; but as they shifted away from pushing atmospheric information and started focusing more on pushing their original creative content, it became less pertinent to my needs.
Yahoo Weather (Photo by Anthony Karcz)
At first I used the
That's why Wunderground by the Weather Underground is my app of choice. The landing page of the app gives me everything I need as soon as it launches: temperature, radar snapshot, current conditions (cloud cover, precipitation chance and wind), as well as any severe weather alerts (if available). The radar is as deep as the rest of the app, letting you see the direction of incoming storms as well as crowd-sourced weather feedback (more on that in a sec).
The forecast lets you parse the available data three different ways: as a long-term weekly graph, as a daily hour-by-hour snapshot, or as a traditional text summary. Digging deeper into the app, you'll get helpful information like Pollen Count, UV Index and Flu Frequency. If there are any tropical disturbances, you'll see those listed in a special section that can be drilled into for forecast tracks and discussions.
But none of this is any good if the data isn't solid. Luckily, I've found Wunderground to almost always be an accurate reflection of my local weather, which makes sense - they use personal weather stations to get multiple snapshots of neighborhood-level weather. And if it's not? There's a spot in the app to submit your own conditions so that it can tweak its algorithms accordingly. You also have the option of switching to the National Digital Forecast Database if you don't quite trust them (but you really should, their accuracy is uncanny).
Now remember when I said that Wunderground gave me everything I needed in a weather app? Well I lied. It doesn't do one thing that's crucial when you live in a state where the sky can be cloudless blue one second, and dumping apocalyptic buckets of rain the next. And that's give me a head's up. For that, I need Dark Sky.
Dark Sky is a brilliant app that does one thing very well, and that's notify you when a storm is going to drop precipitation on your area in the next few minutes. And once it's raining, it will track how long the storm will last and how heavy the precipitation will be. Is it perfect? Well, it doesn't have the accuracy of Wunderground, but as often as it's saved my butt from getting soaked, I'm willing to give it some leeway.
Do you have a favorite weather app? Have you tried Wunderground or Dark Sky and found alternatives? Drop into the comments and let me know!
