Best Weather Sites
Not all weather sites are created equal. All give you a few key current conditions and a 3-5 day forecast. Some give you more, like animated maps with webcams, current temps, etc. and that is what we’re going to compare here in this post.
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Weather Underground (wunderground.com)
This site has all the goodies but the home page isn’t a very pretty first impression. However, if you navigate in to the weather maps and turn on hybrid view and webcams, you get a view as seem in the screen snippet below:
The yellow numbers are the current temperatures. A webcam is highlighted to show it’s view. These are amateur cams so you get what you get. There are massive amounts of information on this site if you can sort it out.
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This site is very pretty but has less information than Weather Underground. The Monthly forecast view shows both previous history for the month and the next two weeks forecast along with historical temperature averages. They have a premium service but I’m only interested in comparing the free weather features. Here is their pretty first rendering of the local conditions.
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The Weather Channel (weather.com)
It makes you wonder when a site that has been around over a decade has a prominent “Beta” in the header logo. Still, I didn’t see anything broken or under construction. The weather channel has much of the same information as the cable weather channel. It isn’t as pretty as Accuweather and also offers a premium service, minus the ads on each page, for $25/year. They also have assorted desktop widgets and apps. Below is one of their weather maps showing cloud cover over my location.
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Without a doubt, this is the mother of all weather sites. There is a mountain of data in here arranged logically. It gets very technical in places but if you drill down far enough you can get some impressive charts. After nearly an hour of wandering around this site, I finally got back to the page I used last winter with a text based report of precipitation around the state over the last three days. Of course, there isn’t much precip to report in the middle of July! In case I need to find my way back, or you attempt to recreate this for your own area, here is the link: text-rainfall table
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Every state has Department of Transportation websites with traffic information and webcams from around the state. This makes one of the best checks for local snowfall and visually observable weather conditions. Below is an example of my local state and a camera shot from Mount Rainier lodge. See it’s July and no snow in the parking lot. Also, most cameras have local lighting for night viewing.
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This site is new to me, but showed up as #1 in a search for weather websites. It’s very fast and easy to navigate with lots of pretty maps.
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I know this site best by the iPad app, which is my favorite weather app for that device. Below is the view for an iPad, from the Weatherbug site. All the same information is there for the desktop PC, but it isn’t presented all in one place. The GUI just isn’t as nice as Accuweather, for instance.
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Summary:
Weather Underground has the best weather mapping, I think. Accuweather is the prettiest site. NOAA wins hands down for raw data. Weatherbug has the best mobile apps. I like DOT for viewing local weather conditions before a commute and also I keep a streaming home and work webcam of my own for checking before commutes.
Written July 17, 2010 by Vic Richardson
