Friday, January 21, 2005

"Whither Weather?": Weather Sites and Tools

As the sky dumps an endless supply of the white powdery stuff here in the Midwest, my thoughts turn to weather sites and tools. There are quite a few of them out there, and they all have their positives and negatives. Here's a look at the notable ones:

Weather Sites


Accuweather.com
http://www.accuweather.com
My current favorite. Lots of great data and maps, with a moderate amount of advertising. Nice hour-by-hour charts.


Weather.com (The Weather Channel)
http://www.weather.com
Good information but such a clunky, ad-heavy page that I often look elsewhere. You're better off using a site that uses weather.com's data like cnn.com.


Weatherunderground.com
http://www.weatherunderground.com
A bit amateurish-looking, but information-rich, weatherunderground looks like a site built by weather geeks. One standout feature is the "Zoom Satellite" which allows you to zoom in and out of an animated map. Very cool.

Intellicast.com
http://www.intellicast.com
Solid, if unspectacular site.

Weather Tools

Weatherbug
The best tool out there. Great radar maps, webcams, and detailed forecasts. Be careful configuring alerts though. It can become a bit of a nuisance. Advertising is limited to a big banner ad at the bottom of the interface, which you at least get to choose when installing.


Desktop Weather (The Weather Channel)
Popular tool with some great features. I'm a big fan of the weather trend chart that shows the hourly temperature changes over 12 hours. With the bells and whistles comes a lot of advertising and fluffy garbage that mars an otherwise nifty interface.

WeatherPulse
Popular tool uses weather.com data in a very simple and clean interface. Not a lot of bells and whistles.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Love this blog and found this weather feature interesting. I had preferred the standard Desktop Weather tool from the weather channel. I will now be checking out these others for comparison as I have none installed at this time.