weather forecast

  • Weather Forecaster Packs Report With 'Batman v Superman' Puns

    Can you spot them all?

  • Rain Will NOT Fizzle Out Weekend Fireworks Displays, Say Forecasters

    Heavy rain will not wash out weekend fireworks, weather forecasters have said. Tomorrow will again be damp, particularly in the north of England, Wales and Scotland. There will be a risk of thunder in places but the Met Office is yet to confirm whether the storms will be potent enough to bear a human name.

  • July May Be Wet But Summer Is Making A Comeback In SCORCHING August

    Britain has been lashed by torrential rain and autumn temperatures over the past few days but as July ends, so does the unseasonal weather. Forecasters are predicting dry weather and hot temperatures from the second week of August - meaning staycationers can stop fearing a holiday washout. James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, said the early signs for August were good, with temperatures potentially reaching as high as 32 degrees.

  • Weather Forecaster Can't Stop, Won't Stop Unleashing Taylor Swift Lyrics In Hilarious Report

    Mike Thomas, a weather forecaster in Washington, D.C., delivered a special report earlier this week, ahead of Taylor Swift's 1989 World Tour stop in the nation's capital. The hilarious report caught the attention of Taylor herself, who gave Thomas a shoutout on Twitter.

  • UK Set For Summer Scorcher With Hottest Day Of The Year Predicted Next Week

    Summer has had a mixed start in Britain so far but next week sun-worshippers can look forward to the hottest day of the year so far.

  • iWeather has some clever features in a crowded field

    iWeather (free, ad-supported with in-app options) is a graphically interesting and reasonably complete weather app. The problem for most new weather apps like iWeather is being creative enough to get people to stop using some of the leading weather apps like Yahoo Weather, Apple's built-in app, and other popular apps like WeatherBug. iWeather has a very clean look, and is gesture-driven. Pull down to add cities, tap for details, pinch for multi-city display. The app includes a 5-day forecast, and automatically figures out your current location using GPS. Each city displays temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind chill, and visibility. Background colors change based on time of day and the weather conditions. You can also share weather information via Facebook, Twitter and email. It's a worldwide app, rather than being focused only on US cities. I like having four cities tiled to see them all at once, something I haven't seen on too many other weather apps. The paid version lets you display more cities and eliminates the ads, which are really the big problem with iWeather -- they are placed at the top of the screen where they are sure to distract you. Worse, the ads are animated, so your eye is drawn toward them. The US$0.99 in-app purchase fixes that, but iWeather has to compete with Yahoo and Apple's free apps that provide even more information. WeatherBug has a free version with ads, but they are at the bottom of the display and, to my eyes, less distracting. iWeather has some really good visual ideas, but it is hampered by the way ads are implemented. There isn't enough here to pull me away from using Yahoo Weather or WeatherBug, but the in-app purchase is not expensive if you like the layout of this app and the nice features. Another nice free app is Minimalist Weather. It has no ads or in-app purchases, but includes a nice GUI and complete current weather information that includes your time zone, latitude and longitude. It foregoes the forecast to concentrate on instrument-derived data. iWeather requires iOS 7 or later. It's universal, so it will run on any iDevice, and it is optimized for the iPhone 5.

  • Wthr is a well thought out and innovative weather app for iOS

    Whtr is a free universal app (with in-app purchase options) with a fresh take on how weather information should be presented and organized. The screens are very clean and simple. The app UI is gesture-based, so swiping up brings up the next screen. There is a clever option to drag the current temperature around an arc that represents a clock to show you future temperature predictions. You can also use the same gestures for predictions of air quality. The free version is quite complete, providing wind speeds, conditions in my favorite cities, sunset and sunrise times, dew point and more. The app covers about a million locations around the world, and using my iPhone's GPS capabilities it had no trouble pinpointing my home location. There are 2 in-app purchases. The $1.99 purchase adds more features, including adding more than two cities as favorites and providing visibility readouts. An HD Radar upgrade ($2.99) provides a NOAA-sourced radar plot. I like Whtr. The free version is ad-free, which is very commendable. The extra features are worthwhile, but I'd rather see the radar and other features bundled into a $1.99 upgrade. One bug I noticed was that if I scrolled the interface down to radar, which I hadn't purchased, the app seemed to get stuck and I could not go back to the weather conditions. I had to shut the app down to start again. Also, to get to the city list, you pinch the main screen -- which isn't very intuitive. An icon for that function might save users some frustration. There's a lot of fresh thinking in Wthr, but don't forget Yahoo Weather (free) or WeatherBug (free and optional in-app purchases to remove ads) which in my view are the two top general weather apps around. Wthr runs on any iOS hardware that supports iOS 7 or later. It is optimized for the iPhone 5.

  • Simple Weather is an elegant 'just the facts' app

    With so many weather apps, making the best choices for your iPhone can be a conundrum. Simple Weather (free , supported by in-app advertising) is just that, a bare-bones but attractive app that takes its background colors from the current conditions, and features a screen of basic information that can be added to with taps and swipes. Tapping the temperature gives you a 'feels like' estimate. Swipe down to add a new location. Swipe up for the latest radar. Swipe left for an extended forecast. Simple, yet effective and attractive. There are a few things I'd like to see added. Multiple cities (coming according to the developer) and location awareness (also on the way). But I do like the look of the app (with reservations noted below) and the good ideas that go into it. My go-to app for weather remains Yahoo Weather (free), which I find superior to Apple's built-in app. I also really like Dark Skies (US$3.99) for simplicity and its notification system. Simple Weather is appealing, and it is, as its name implies, simple. The app will grow and be enhanced after this first version, and I think it will find a home on many iPhones. One negative, and it's not insignificant: As nice as the design is, the app is ad-supported, and some of the ads that are popping up on the main and the radar page are downright ugly and spoil all the good work done in the well thought-out graphics. Developers who allow ads should consider how their good work is minimized by this form of visual pollution. I understand the need for free apps wanting support, but sometimes a pretty high price is paid in the name of earning a few bucks. Simple Weather is not a universal app.It requires iOS 7 and it is optimized for the iPhone 5. If you have your own favorites feel free to share in comments.

  • REVEALED: Strange Link Between Bad Weather, Bug Behavior

    As the climate changes, insect sex and other activity may shift as well, the research also suggests. "For an aphid, a raindrop is something like what a refrigerator would be like falling on us," said researcher Jeremy McNeil, an entomologist and chemical ecologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Preliminary research from McNeil and others found that insects apparently changed how they emitted and responded to pheromones — scents linked with sex — depending on the weather.

  • WeatherPro for iOS has a wealth of weather details

    Oh no! Another weather app. Actually, I'm thrilled at all the competition. WeatherPro has a great deal of information, far more than I see in most other weather apps. It is also very graphical in its approach, and a quick glance will show you a lot about the area your are interested in. WeatherPro for iPhone is on sale for US$1.99 (regular $3.99), and the iPad version is $2.99 (normally $4.99). [Note: Sale prices have ended] Of course WeatherPro has a seven-day forecast with dynamic short-term forecasts, 2 million reporting locations from almost anywhere in the world, alerts and warning for extreme weather, sunrise and sunset time (a detail many apps leave out) and animated radar and satellite maps that are zoomable. It also features iCloud sync if you are running the app on multiple iOS devices, no limit to the number of locations you can display and the ability to use GPS to figure out your current location so you don't have to look it up. %Gallery-194022% The app is quite complete, but there are premium options for European customers that include a 14-day forecast, lightning strike plots, ski and beach weather and higher-resolution images. The additional data options are $5.99 and $1.99 depending on the mix of information you want. I don't think the extra purchase is necessary, and US buyers will find the app very complete as it is. I put the app through its paces and found it responsive and easy to read. It found every small town and obscure location I gave it, which backs up the claims of millions of locations. The satellite maps and radar maps displayed smoothly. I also liked a little feature that lets you email or send someone a text of your current conditions. If you have a backyard weather station from Netatmo, the app supports getting data from it. WeatherPro is well-named. It has a lot of info and is a complete weather solution. WeatherPro requires iOS 5 and is optimized for the iPhone 5.

  • Homeless TV Weather Reporters?

    Homeless people are being recruited to give the forecast on many European stations to raise awareness of those living on the street. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. The advertising firm of Saatchi & Saatchi in Berlin launched the concept for the Days of Hope and is still in the process of encouraging stations to invite weather readers off the street to temporarily replace their on-air employees, said John Pallant, Saatchi & Saatchi's regional creative director.

  • Daily iPhone App: Weathercube is an interesting but eccentric iOS app

    Weathercube is an interesting and graphically pleasing approach to giving you the weather on your iPhone or iPod touch. It is not universal, but will run on an iPad in 2x mode. It sells for US$1.99. Weathercube supports several gestures which will get you to extended forecasts, other pre-set cities and even the settings. It provides a lot of information, and swiping the screen gets you a slick animation that looks like the cube is turning in perspective. If you look at the app icon you can get an idea of the animation effect. %Gallery-164565% Where the app fails is displaying the information in an easily accessible format. Here's an example. When you open the app you are presented with sky conditions, temperature, wind speed and barometer reading. At the bottom of the screen, two percentages are displayed. Why two? Because one is cloud cover, the other is humidity, but they are not labelled. Same with temperature. On the home screen, you get a high temperature prediction, not the current temperature. It's all a bit confusing. If you want the current temperature you need to swipe down for the hourly temperatures, and the current conditions will be at the top. Worse, next to the predicted hourly temperatures is the predicted barometric temperature, which is I think the last thing you would want in a prediction. How about wind speed or humidity? The app allows you to select background colors to personalize the look of the screens, but with some combinations it is hard to read the labels. Sounds accompany most gestures on the app. I found them distracting, but happily they can be turned off. These issues can be easily fixed, and if they are, Weathercube will be vastly improved. The display is minimalist, but you can dig pretty deep with gestures. Switching to other cities is easy, and the database has more than 1.7 million locations. The app is also multi-lingual, with support for Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and more. I like the idea behind the app, I just think more labels, current conditions moved to the home screen and being careful about the colors obscuring the text would go a long way to make the presentation a success. Weathercube requires iOS 4.3 or later and it's a 9.8 MB download. Some screenshots are below.

  • Google adds browser-based weather feature to tablets with temperature, wind and precipitation

    You may have noticed Google's forecast feature on your HTML5-capable smartphone browser -- simply typing "weather" into the search field brings up a basic real-time temperature tool, complete with hourly and five-day forecasts for your current location. That feature has been around in one form or another since the beginning of last year, but as of this week, it's made its way to tablets, too. Web weather is entirely browser based, and you can bring it up in just the same way as on a smartphone -- confirm that your GPS is enabled, then head to Google.com and type "weather" -- you'll be rewarded with a 10-day forecast, complete with temp, precipitation, humidity and wind speed readouts. The tool is interactive, so while you may only be able to view a few days of weather at once, you can simply slide along the timeline to see more. The same applies to the hourly forecast as well. There's nothing to download or subscribe to for this one, and it's available right now at Google.com. James Trew contributed to this report.

  • Are Weathercasters Misguiding Their Viewers On Climate Change?

    This seeming monopoly on the public's exposure to a critical issue has consequences, according to environmental advocates. Recent studies have found that more than half of the reporters relaying weather on television do not believe humans are the primary drivers of global warming -- despite a consensus among scientists who specialize on the topic. "If you look at the stats over the past five or six years, the public's belief that global warming is a serious problem, or is even happening, is declining," said Daniel Souweine, co-founder of the nonprofit Citizen Engagement Lab.