Know the Weather Better than the Weatherman
Want to have the daily forecast at your fingertips? Wondering what the current temperature is this instant? Want to know when it’s raining so you can close your car windows?
Weather Watcher Live by Singer’s Creations lets you do this and more. It’s powered by WeatherBug stations that provide real time weather feeds to insure you have the latest and most correct data for where you are. It shows the current temperature in the taskbar and when opened displays the time of sunset and sunrise, barometer reading, wind speed and direction, moon phase, precipitation history and more. You feel like a weatherman, but without the blue screen and hand waving.
It’s a little heavy as far as software goes. After using it for a while I opted for the Weatherbug Firefox extension (download). It shows the current temperature and 3-day forecast. I can view the rest of the weather data by clicking on the temperature.
WeatherBug is my preferred source of weather, but it’s by no means the only source. Here are several others.
Weather Underground – Complete forecasts with air quality, almanac values and the works. Excellent resource.
Weather.com – Probably the most well known, but I’ve found their forecasts are off by several degrees compared to the rest of the sites
Qwikcast – Not nearly as thorough as other sites, but what it has is accurate. Has worldwide weather.
How to predict the weather without a web site.
National Weather Service – Has the most detail you’ll find anywhere.
Weather.gov – Radar info, good for forecasting if it’s going to rain at your outdoor party.
I like weatherbug a lot, but with triple the number of weather stations in the US, I find that weather underground allows me to pick from local weather stations for more localized weather – there is a station just one street over and four houses down from my house – and thus more accurate weather reports. The wunderground vista gadget works with windows 7, and while it does not give as much data as weatherbug, clicking it opens that page at the wunderground website for detailed coverage. I highly recommend giving it a try.
@Tom I agree, Weather Underground is great too, though I haven’t used their widget, just their web site.