Mourning loss of Dark Sky - best weather app?

I will miss Dark Sky in a month when it goes away. Dark Sky is my go to app, along with Weather Underground and Storm Radar. What is your favorite weather app?

I’m happy with Apple’s weather app.

2 Likes

We will have to be happy with it…but Dark Sky it ain’t and it’s no way an adequate replacement. Another fine app Sherlocked.

2 Likes

I think we’ve talked about this, but I like Carrot most so far, I also like Hello Weather, and I’m also thinking if I can just live with the stock weather app (which I use with the watch and it’s complication, which stays updated more than a third party app does.)

Dark Sky is still my favorite weather app. Will be sad to see it go. The Apple app has gotten better, but it ain’t as good, imo

2 Likes

I’ve never been impressed with Dark Sky. That’s perhaps because I live in Canada, albeit within a couple of hundred kilometres of New York and Ohio and Michigan. The Apple Weather app seems OK, but like Dark Sky it misinterprets what happens when we’re surrounded by three Great Lakes who modify weather quite remarkably at times (i.e., the mess that dropped on Buffalo — and on our Bruce Peninsula, though you never heard about that). I do like the graphical presentation of AppleWeather data as provided in WeatherGraph. While it presents similar data to Dark Sky and the Apple Weather app, I prefer its short-term graphic presentation.
First and foremost, I use the WeatherCan from our national weather offices. It reads actual conditions from 10 km away from me and has the most believable fine-grain predictions. (Curiously, Snowflake provides those same data points from 10 km away.) RadarScope is by far the best radar app. I also like MeteoBlue and especially Windy, both European apps that compile and compare various weather models and forecasts. Using them I can keep on top of over a dozen models. I also rely on Astrospheric for night sky observing.
Carrot has good radar projections that they get from elsewhere, but I’m letting my subscription for Carrot lapse when its time runs out.
To each, their own, eh? (Says this Canuck :)

1 Like

I do think there’s already been a lot of discussion about this relatively recently.

I will as well. The biggest advantage of Dark Sky for me was it’s precision – you can put an actual street address in and it will give you the weather for that location. With Apple Weather, it only gives you the city – which is useless.

However, I have discovered that the current Weather app does give you hyper-location weather. It still won’t let you input your address (you can only type in a city name), but if you let it show you the weather at your current location, it actually does show it for that address and seems to be fairly accurate.

In my case I’m at 800 feet elevation outside of town, while my mother lives just 5 miles away but in town at a much lower elevation. Our weather is very different (just temps can be 5-10 degrees different). I loved Dark Sky because it would show this difference, but now Weather is doing that, too, but only for the current location.

That’s fine when I’m at home, but fails if I’m elsewhere and want to see the conditions at home. Weather will only show me the data for my town, which is pointless. Really wish it supported remembering an address like Dark Sky.

So far I haven’t found any other weather app that supports such precise location and remembers it. All I’ve tried use zip code or city name for saved places.

1 Like

Both Carrot Weather and Hello Weather do this. (No comment on how accurate the weather and forecast are, but by default Hello uses Dark Sky’s API.)

Like Marilyn, I find the Weather app fine for casual use. I do have specific needs for weather forecasting for photography or film shoots and a combination of Windy, premium version, and Snowflake are great for narrowing things down.

2 Likes

NOAA weather site lets you pinpoint location on their map. MyRadar app does the same. I get precise forecasts.

Yeah…I’ve been using that along with Dark Sky for awhile now and like it enough that I paid for one of the mid tier subscriptions, Still like the future radar better in DS but Carrot is close…and once you turn personality and profanity to over the top (or whatever the specific selection is noted) then she’s pretty funny as well…and I don’t like the future radar in Weather as much either.

1 Like

Had not noticed that…and the hyper local is one of the better features of DS. At least here in SW FL…if I get North Fort Myers which technically we are in but we’re on the northern edge of the city I get the wrong weather from everything but DS. Choosing Punta Gorda the next city north doesn’t work either. Because of the barrier islands offshore here we frequently get storms that pass either slightly north or south and it can be pouring 4 miles in either direction but sunny here and DS has always given me the best weather at my house info. Glad to know that Weather uses actual location for hyper local as well.

There are no weather models that forecast to that precise an area or location. The highest resolution models are currently running a ∆x of ~3km grid point spacing. That means they can resolve features of ~4∆x , or about 12 km. Everything else is interpolated.

4 Likes

This has lead to a myriad of photos showing Apple’s weather app on two different phones showing the same city, but different temperatures and weather.

I have to explain one is a city forecast and one is the hyper local showing the same city name.

Tip: If you scroll to the bottom of the Weather screen, it will show the street name of the hyper-local location. I’ve found that to be helpful in distinguishing between the two.

4 Likes

I’ve always looked at the dots on the bottom of the screen representing your saved locations. If the arrow one at the front is highlighted, it’s your current hyper-local location. However, the location on the very, very bottom would help in explaining why the temperature on one phone is different than the same weather on the other phone even if both are displaying the same city name.

Yes, the pinpoint in NOAA defines an area, less than a mile square. But that area is in a microclimate between mountain range foothills zone and valley/town zone. Yes, my forecast is an interpolation but it is very accurate for this microclimate.

1 Like

I’ve been mostly depending on Windy, with a side swipe at Sailflow (one of a suite of weather apps for people who recreate on the water using wind). Windy has many good features - it’s international, it shows tides, it can be configured for a variety of conditions (rain, clouds, waves, air quality etc.), it has an easily movable map, if you scroll in deep enough it becomes a road map, with many useful features like landmark names, road names, topographical characteristics. As a backup and for quick info I use Wundergroud.

DS has been my favorite, I use Weather Strip, Apple default and Hello. I like the layout of Weather Strip the best. Recommended.