All summer I start my computer each morning just to check the weather for my commute(bicycle/motorcycle).
I tried some android weather apps but nothing fit. I didn't want the current weather or the afternoon weather I needed details and I wanted them at a glance(widget).
Also my phone know where I am so don't ask me, just give me the weather regardless of if I'm on vacation or at a friends.
Using the same code to make an html 5 geo based version as well.
It's been "*Experimental*" for several years, and the site looks kind of dated, but it provides a useful visualization of radar, satellite, tropical storms, etc, plus it runs on my old PC! =)
I also like the NWS Hourly Graph to give a better idea of for example when it's going to start or stop raining or go below freezing on a given day.
I find that more important than the model used, is that you get actionable intel. To me, actionable intel boils down to 2 P's . Precision, and Probability.
So, I don't care if tomorrow there's a 50% chance of rain. I care that at a precise time of the day , say 9am, has a 10% precipitation and at noon is 90% , because i commute at 9am, not at noon. Wind is also an important factor if its raining. Temp as well. I need all this info presented as a mosaic.
For this purpose, I find the NOAA forecast local by hour is unrivaled. https://www.weather.gov/okx/ . Enter ZIP and then in enter local forecast by hour.
I have this URL bookmarked in my browser. I haven't looked back since. Example:
Just substitute your XX.XXXX latitude and your YY.YYYY longitude (negative from 0 if you're in the US) for the <> and their contents as variables.
There's also a tabular form of this. Very dense in terms of hourly forecasts. I tend to plug in various lat/long changes to figure out when a storm is going to blow into the kid's sporting event clear across town. Each degree of latitude or longitude is 68.3 miles, so you can usually just adjust the URL to get a pinpoint forecast...which is useful in metro areas where you might be traveling 40-45 miles to an event.
Great information density, clean interface and has by the far the best widget of any weather app I've seen. It manages to display so much information with graphs without being visually overloaded.
I've set up something similar for myself, using WebLiveWallpaper to fetch a PNG of the latest local (Finnish) radar + temperature map.
It's rather surprising how easily having a bird's-eye view of the weather sort of fades into the background of your consciousness and becomes an accepted fact. I use my phone often enough that it just feels like I have an extra sense that tells me what the weather's like. Very odd.
This is a very simple hack that grabs weather data from the weather.gov and noaa.gov websites
I made it so I could grab exactly what I wanted and focused on where I live. It's not pretty, but it's fast and informative.
I used jQuery and Bootstrap but all the JS code to view the options and fetch the data are in the html page so it's pretty easy to configure it for any part of the US.
I am a fan of the 2 day graphical forecast from NOAA, everything including dew point, cloud coverage, and wind speeds/direction on one screen and easy to understand the trend...
http://www.averageweather.io/ - tool to make planning for travel much easier. When you are too far out for a forecast, I found myself taking too many clicks to get average weather data.
EDIT - Whoa. Getting lots of traffic. This site is like 3 days old and I taught myself python and django to build it. Open to any recommendations at jonathan at averageweather dot io
EDIT 2 - Back up... Site crash ... Google apps shutdown smtmp connections which crashed my entire site.
* the current temperature
* the high or low over the next 12 hours
* graphical forecast of the 12 hours (including chance of precipitation)
which is all the info I need to know to dress for wherever I'm taking the bus to. You can get all this info (including graphics!) from weather.gov DWML, e.g. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.7143&lon=-7...
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