Because I spend so much time outdoors (biking, paddling, camping) I have become a weather geek. My favorite must-have weather apps are RadarScope Pro (real-time radar and lightning strikes) and The Weather Channel app.



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Intellicast stopped updating their iphone app and it was replaced by an app called Storm, which I love. The hourly forecasts show both percentage chance of precipitation and accumulation. This tells me if I should bring gear for a light drizzle or a downpour.

Dark Sky is good if your timing is flexible. It gives a graphic representation of precipitation probability for the next hour and is based only on GPS location. I can leave early or late from my work (and home), so I can wait until a shower passes or leave early to beat a storm that is rolling in.

Weather underground is too busy.

The thing to understand about most all these apps....They're basically all made by the same company.

Weather Underground, Intellicast, etc.....all are owned and backed and developed by The Weather Channel alias "The Weather Company". If Weather Channel would stop spreading their resources out across 5+ different apps (and website domains) under different subsidiary monikers-they could make something amazing....which I think is what they're moving towards.


Accuweather is the only other commercial weather domain I can name offhand that isn't owned/operated by The Weather Company.

Three sources...

Weather Underground gives hour by hour temperature, wind, and precipitation in table form (not just "chance of rain" for the day which is useless), and a rain forecast. It's not always perfect, but you can watch the radar too. Monday I rode home on wet roads, but the forecast was right enough that it wasn't raining enough to change clothes. Weather Underground is also notable for having automated crowdsourcing, anyone can hook up their little weather station to the network, and they have a lot of widgets on their page asking if their forecast is correct.

The second is the Facebook page of NWS Sacramento who do a pretty good job telling the story of the weather

The third is this Tahoe ski blog, which does a good job talking about storms coming in during the wet season, and the climate for the water year. Not intended for a Sacramento rain storm forecast but it amounts to one nevertheless.
https://opensnow.com/dailysnow/tahoe

Weather forecasts are a heck of a lot more accurate than they used to be.

To be pedantic, and I am, The Weather Channel was purchased by IBM, who wanted (no, not Weather Forecasts) access to their ultra-high volume web transaction technology.

WRT the original poster, I use the Dark Sky app. I believe it's powered by Forecast.io.

If you use Ride With GPS, Strava, or Map My Ride, an iPhone app called Epic Ride Weather allows you to identify a saved route, the start and stop time for your ride and it will give you the weather and wind you can expect along the route. It uses the Dark Sky/forecast.io data for the forecast.

www.epicrideweather.com

Wow, thanks for that, [MENTION=94771]ascherer[/MENTION].

best of both worlds!

Word on The Weather Channel.
I've been using Wunderground for years but lately, for unknown reasons, they've been missing the mark. Are the patterns changing and they haven't changed the prediction models? I don't know, but they've been off at least twice a week with forecast temps and rain - it rained on two days where they predicted none. Fine, it was drizzle that didn't show up on the radar, but it was a cold, miserable 45-degree drizzle.

Accuweather's not much better either, unfortunately. I've started looking at NWS forecasts, but they're not as detailed.

I do the same, mainly with our local NBC affiliate. If there's rain in the forecast for the next day, I always watch the 6 and 10 PM newscast with their "Futurecast" to see if it might be raining in the 6 AM and 5 PM hour when I'm most likely to be riding. If it looks like there will be a break in the rain, then I'll usually go ahead and ride to work. If I wake up at 5 AM and it's pouring with no end in sight, then I'll just drive.

If you can read a graph (not everyone can, unfortunately), the local forecast (use your zip code) followed by the hourly weather forecast down at the bottom right is pretty good for most things: precipitation probability, precipitation amount, wind and wind gusts, etc.

That's pretty cool. Wish Google Maps would do something like this for drives

Hey, that's sweet

Hourly Weather Forecast for 38.68N 121.23W (Elev. 256 ft)

Very cool indeed. Downloaded and installed and linked to my Strava account. It will prove very useful. Thanks.

A few years back, a local radio station had what they called "Ginger the weather dog". The concept was pretty simple - in the morning the owner would offer the dog the opportunity to spend the day indoors or outdoors. If the dog elected to spend the day indoors, they took that to mean rain, otherwise they took it to mean that it would not rain.
Yeah, it was silly. But surprisingly accurate. Better than some of the other human forecasters that were on TV.

Awesome find! Thanks for this. I used it today.

J.

Weather Underground. I never found AccuWeather, WeatherBug or Weather Channel to be accurate. Waeather underground has been pretty accurate and their app is fantastic for forecasting rides.

NOAA.Gov

This seems really cool but I'm struggling to get it to work with mapmyride. Seems clunky.

I've only used it with Ride with GPS, sorry.

Yeah and it's also $3.99 every six months apparently. I'll just stick to TWC app and watching the local forecast.

I like this but I can't figure out how to change the location! Hints?

Hmm, topographically that page is a twig at the end of a branch at the end of a ...


Best bet is probably to click on the NWS logo at the top right, search for your location, then click on the hourly forecast graph down near the bottom of the page.

[MENTION=152773]noglider[/MENTION] put your zip code in upper left at National Weather Service then the chart will be generated at lower right of the result

Hourly Weather Forecast for 40.74N 74.01W (Elev. 0 ft)

OR, the numbers in the URL are the coordinates

Hourly Weather Forecast for 40.69N 73.99W (Elev. 30 ft)