Happy to pay for it. If I can drill into lots of data, that's a bonus.
Wunderground. It was bought by the Weather Channel but prior to that it was basically a big, geeky front end for NOAA and the Citizen Weather Observer Program. It takes actual data, actual meteorology reports from actual meteorologists and presents them to you. Once the Weather Channel got ahold of it they started offering numeric weather reporting; the important thing to know about Wunderground is if you're out in the sticks, and no human-tuned weather report is available to you, you might end up getting a forecast based on artificial intelligence rather than human experience (the humans almost always win). Compare and contrast with anything that uses Accuweather, which actually takes NOAA data and fucks with it because they know you'd rather be surprised by sun than disappointed with rain. Serious. Fuck Accuweather. Also they lobbied to shut down the National Weather Service because of course they did. Also fuck Apple because the iPhone uses Accuweather. This is me. You should also be aware of Radarscope. If you would like to know if it's going to rain on you in the next 10 minutes it will tell you. I check it three times a day. If my local radar is in Clear Air Mode, the convertible top goes down.
Hm. You have your own weather station? On the birth center, I presume? What's it take to set up a weather station? My area seems particularly underserved, and with a west-facing view of Puget Sound, I think my location might provide people with a useful data point. Is there an amateur weather station network I can SaaS-connect to? What's it cost to get set up? Hows it all work?
Birth center don't need a weather station. I've been tempted to foist it on my daughter's school, but only so I can add a pollution monitor with a clear conscience.. The short answer is "anything that will talk to CWOP." That means like just about any jackass LaCrosse or whatever. What you'll discover is that the easiest way to do shit is netatmo which literally sits there like a lump of shit and kind of gives you temperature and humidity. The long answer is once you're online you start to give a shit about downtime and you start to care about accuracy and you start to feel smug and superior to the fact that yours is sited correctly which means it doesn't spike 30 degrees when the sun hits it like whoever the hell KCAPLAYA4 is and you feel smug that Wunderground is artificially shaping his data because we all know it isn't 118 degrees in Venice. So you buy a Davis Vantage Pro 2 like everyone else, even though it's like $500, and you buy a Weatherlink IP because you're getting fucking sick of Weathercat taking a shit on you constantly and you upgrade your router from a Netgear to a Ubiquiti because fucking static IP means "don't switch my subnet to .100 simply because you don't know how to talk to Comcast you piece of shit" and before too long you've spent like $1000 so that you can tell it's raining without looking outside. It's a disease. Should you go down this road know that nobody pays retail. Shopping around is your friend.
This is what we are doing, after a fashion, for our observatory. We have a hook in that a guy at NOAA likes our club and is going to see what he can do for us. Air Quality monitor, All-Sky camera, Weather Station, Internet Connect everything. In a spot in the country where there are no other weather reporting stations in 30 miles. We are also crying poverty and seeing about grants etc as we are "helping" the community.
This is something I might consider for next year. It sounds juuuust geeky enough to keep me interested, and juuuuust altruistic enough for me to want to continue to provide the service once I get it working. And at around $1k, I'd be willing to spend that on the system. I have a friend with a bangin' weather station out in Indianola. Correlating our two monitoring systems from the northwest and southeast of Elliott Bay, could provide some interesting data... Heck... weather98146.com is even available...
Weathercat is the mac equivalent of Weather Display. With Weathercat and a Vantage Pro 2 you'd have an identical setup to him, only on Mac vs. PC.
I have like 4-5. If you ever don't know where you're going to sleep rain is kinda a big deal. Haven't had that problem in a while but I still have multiple weather apps so I can compare notes between them There might be a better one for what you want than Weather Underground but I don't know about it. I just opened it real quick to refresh my memory. Off the rip it gives you radar, temperature, wind speed, air quality, precipitation chance, monthly stats, forecast and a bunch of other goodies. And I believe there's more granular information for some of these if you tap them
I usually just want to know if it's going to warm up in the afternoon so I have a couple apps that are really simple and one that's just pretty. But if bad weather is coming in I go to Weather Underground. It's a good resource for the possibility of the earth killing you due to pressure differentials in the atmosphere or whatever
Same here. Yahoo weather for the general conditions, but Weather Underground is my go-to when the weather gets hairy as it offers more detail. Yahoo is nice for the 10 day general trends. It’s quick and easy to one-thumb through. Ads don’t seem to hang it up as Weather Underground seems to as it opens up slower and clunkier.
Gah, the ad animations crash the radar animations. I might spring for the ad-free, paid version, it’s probably worth it. Best weather service and app, hands down.
I'm going to join the chorus of Weather Underground, and I also use Storm by WU in conjunction with WU. Storm provides a nice interface for watching radar, tracking storm cells, and following watches/warnings. And you can jump straight into a location-based radar without a lot of menus or scrolling. It also can do notifications for lightning and rain near you. If you live somewhere that strong storms are a fact of life, Storm is an excellent secondary weather app. I was once scared to death of strong storms and drilling into radar and how storms move and form helps me get over it.
It's not a dedicated weather app, I just keep a link to weather.gov for my zip code on the home screen of my phone. The storage space on my phone is limited, so it works well for my purposes. The hourly weather forecast alone is fantastic, and it's all totally free. For sure though, if you're looking for an app, Wunderground is the way to go.