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Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

I was really hoping https://merrysky.net/ had a graphical forecast similar to weather underground's 10 day. I've yet to find anything else that quickly shows everything you'd want to know in a single image. Even the mouseover timeline is perfection. It is so good and seemingly exclusive to WU that I sometimes wonder if they hold a patent for it.

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The _presentation_ is impressive, but the forecast is often the raw output from various models, and thus not entirely reliable. For example, I live in a valley where most forecast models smooth over giving more snow/cold than we ever get.

I have a similar issue living on a hill with the windy.com forecasts. Have you had success finding any forecast source/app that’s accurate for your microclimate? Everyone always points to forecastadvisor.com but that’s always pulling from some airport 20 miles away for me totally irrelevant.

Related tangent: Windy (iOS app) does a remarkably good job providing multiple data sources and terrific dataviz.

Is it the app named "Windy.com", "Windy.app", or something else?

Edit: I suspect it's the Windy.app one. My initial impression is it looks quite nice. Available on both iOS and Android.

yes, windy.app

ubiquitous among boaters (incl myself)

also on Android. Fantastic for tracking Hurricanes

I agree with you, but I've also found the https://windy.com timeline along the bottom to be similarly informative, with ECMWF data to boot.

WeatherStrip does this beautifully. https://www.weatherstrip.app/ Weathergraph is also nice, and has a new optional Dark Sky skin. https://weathergraph.app/

"... similar to weather underground's 10 day ..."

Came here, like I come to every weather API/tool discussion, to ask the same thing ... I would really like a less spammy, less bloated 10-day forecast a la WU.

This comes close, however - there's a nice 7-day lookahead ... is it possible that WU is just fudging days 8-9-10 and no real data is available beyond 7 days ?

Persistence and linear regression are very common methods used to extend forecasts out in computationally cheap ways. Most forecast models have really awful validation statistics after about 48-60 hours out—depending on initial conditions, location, and a few other factors—so in some sense the forecast after about 3 days out isn't ever going to be very good so it's perfectly valid to use those methods. I would not be at all surprised if that's what Weather Underground does.

Another method that's occasionally used is to just fill in with TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) data. Lots of those data sets are freely available, or if not, are very inexpensive to calculate if station data is available.

If you're looking for a minimally spammy, information dense forecast and you're in the US, it's pretty hard to beat weather.gov. (And make sure to occasionally read the zone and regional forecast discussion texts, too. They're really interesting and often educational!)

Ten years ago beyond a week forecasts underperformed long term climatic averages, not sure if that has changed yet.

Try Ventusky (https://www.ventusky.com/)

On Android, there is an awesome app called Flowx. Probably the best weather app I have used.

Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check out Flowx.

A while back I installed quite a few weather apps on Android, at the time, I felt wX and QuickWeather (from F-Droid) were the best. Maybe Flowx will be even better :-)

Hi, I am making an iOS app that could make you happy:

Link: https://weathergraph.app

Screenshots: https://impresskit.net/6430c7f0-b34b-418f-9824-f386f939be9a/...

What do you think?

You can also try the Glance Weather widget on Android.

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