The 15 Best Weather Apps

With the world opening up and people looking to travel for work, leisure, and the opportunity to catch up with loved ones, it’s time to set alerts for travel deals and start paying attention to weather conditions. 

Unfortunately, freezing temperatures and frequent snow storms seem to be on tap for 2022, and this is causing all kinds of travel delays. Whether you’re trying to plan for a road trip, heading overseas, or staying local to avoid the rising cost of gas and airline travel, tracking the temp, precipitation, and other factors can help to ensure that you’re always prepared.

Here are some of the best weather apps to keep you in-the-know about the local weather conditions. 

The Weather Channel

For almost 40 years, The Weather Channel has been a trusted source for weather forecasts across the U.S. These days, you don’t have to tune in for their cable broadcasts or even hit up Weather.com to find out what’s happening outdoors in your area. 

Now, you can simply download the app to get “weather your way,” featuring live radar, weather maps for national and local conditions, and forecasts. Updates extend up to two weeks so you can plan with confidence.

WeatherBug

This app claims to serve up the “best real-time weather forecast.” With their interactive map and live radar, local and national forecasts, and info for 2.6 million locations worldwide, they’re certainly contenders. 

With this app, you’ll find information about temperature, humidity, wind, and pressure readings, with options to view current, hourly, and 10-day forecasts. You can also get weather warnings, alerts, and pollen counts. If you want accuracy, up-to-the-minute weather, and some handy extras, WeatherBug is a winner. 

AccuWeather

As the name implies, superior accuracy is the first priority with the AccuWeather app. Although weather forecasts are always a skosh suspect—after all, they are predictions of things to come—the science and technology behind weather tracking have come a long way over the years. Now, you can enjoy reasonably accurate weather up to a week, a month, or even 45 days out. 

With hyper-localized mapping, an easy user interface, a hurricane tracker, and filters to set your preferences, you’ll get accurate weather data tailored to your life. 

CARROT Weather

At first glance, you might wonder about the choice of name, but you’ll soon realize it’s just part of the quirky personality behind this “crazy-powerful weather app that delivers a hilariously twisted forecast.” 

You’ll start by choosing the personality you prefer from five different options, ranging from a fairly standard “professional” to an “overkill” persona that spews profanity and literally threatens to strike you dead with lightning. 

If you want your weather served with a side of snark (and achievements for getting a fire or flood warning), CARROT is probably the only app that can accommodate you. On top of the entertainment factor, they value privacy and promise to never sell your data to third parties. 

NOAA Weather: Clime

It’s hard to think of a better source for trusted weather forecasts than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Their all-in-one weather tracker shows you everything from vividly-colored temperature and precipitation graphics to a satellite map with illustrated cloud cover. 

Get precision, real-time weather data, accurate seven-day forecasts, tracking for hurricanes, lighting, and wildfires, governmental severe weather warnings for a slew of countries, the ability to search for and bookmark locations, and much more. 

1Weather

1Weather offers pretty much what you might expect, with live radar, daily and hourly forecasting, and tracking for severe weather (snow, thunderstorms, hurricanes, typhoons, and more). You’ll also enjoy input from numerous weather stations and stats for humidity, wind speed, dew point, and atmospheric pressure. 

As a bonus, you’ll get health information like air quality index (AQI), pollen and pollutant counts, and advice about how to stay healthy and well. The app even features a brand-new dark mode. 

Weather Underground

Ten-day forecasts are just the tip of the iceberg with Weather Underground, which not only populates data pertaining to temperature, wind speed/direction, humidity, dew point, precipitation, air pressure, visibility, and more—it also gives you a heads up on what it “feels like” outside. 

Get severe weather alerts, customize your user experience, and track geographical data like the UV index, AQI, and even local flu outbreaks. With data from NOAA and over 250,000 local and airport weather stations, hyper-accurate weather is all but guaranteed. 

Flowx

Stunning displays are the first thing you’re likely to notice about this smart weather app, which features unique maps, graphs, and forecast animation to help you visualize the weather anywhere in the world. 

With over 30 different data types to peruse, as well as 20 forecast models, radar reflectivity, extreme weather tracking, and more, you can not only get a handle on today’s weather—you can also plan for upcoming fishing, hiking, and cycling trips. Dozens of data sources inform the multiple data layers for maps and graphs. 

MyRadar

Touted as the highest-rated top five weather app—with over 50 million downloads and a 4.8-star rating from over 700,000 reviews—it’s hard to argue with the success of MyRadar. 

The app offers fancy tech-like correlation coefficients and differential reflectivity, which tells you everything from raindrop size to aggregation of dry snow. For true weather buffs who want more than just local temp and humidity, this tech-driven app lets you learn about weather to a nerdy degree. 

Weather Live

The graphics on this gorgeous weather app are pretty enough to use as a background for your home screen, whether you’re looking at fog in San Francisco, rain in Washington, or thunder and lightning in Tulsa. 

You’ll get all today’s weather deets (min/max temps, humidity, wind speed/direction, sunrise/sunset times, wind chill, and more), along with 14 days’ worth of hourly forecasting for locations worldwide. But you’ll stay for the visual feast of nature photography displayed behind the weather data. 

Weather 14 Days – Meteored

Meteored brings over 20 years of weather forecasting experience to the table in an app that gives you the weather for—you guessed it—14 days out. 

They allegedly use “the best prediction model in the world” to provide accurate forecasts and weather alerts. The animated world forecast map uses live radar. There’s a weather news section to keep you up-to-date on weather phenomena. You’ll even receive official, extreme weather alerts for your area from the National Weather Service. 

Customize settings, use the widget for a quick take on weather in your location of choice, and choose from over 6,000,000 locations in over 50 countries (and 20 languages). 

What The Forecast?!!

Another quirky contender for your favorite weather app, What the Forecast?!! sets expectations with their name—and it gets weirder from there. 

If you appreciate daily weather summaries like, “Today is like a Coach purse full of cat vomit. Well, except it’s cold,” then this is clearly the app for you. You’ll still get basics like temps, humidity, wind conditions, NOAA alerts, and so on, as well as handy extras like indices for air quality, arthritis, migraine, sinus, and cold/flu. But what really keeps you coming back are the obnoxious quips. 

Weather & Widget – Weawow

Weawow wants to turn your “boring, text-based forecast” into eye candy with stunning, vibrant pics from photogs around the world to represent your current weather conditions. Users who want to participate can post their own “Wow” photos to the app and if they’re good enough, they’ll be featured. Talk about gamification. 

Detailed weather reporting includes temp, “feels like” temp, rain, clouds, humidity, pressure, and about 20 other data points. Pick your faves to customize your interface and manage your preferred places with bookmarks. 

Weather Hi-Def Radar

Overlays are the name of the game with this interactive weather app. You start simply enough with local or global high-definition radar maps and then choose overlays like real-time weather layers (radar, clouds, temp, water temp, wind speed, snow fall, and more), severe storm layers (tornado, thunderstorm, hurricane, flood, blizzard, earthquake, and other weather watches and alerts), and the option to track active fires in your area. 

Perhaps the most useful feature of the app is the ability to monitor current road conditions, so you know if you’re about to run into freezing rain on the expressway. 

RadarScope

The NEXRAD system is a joint effort between the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Transportation that includes 160 hi-rex S-band Doppler weather radars operated by the National Weather Service. 

The NEXRAD Level 3 radar used by RadarScope remotely detects atmospheric features to deliver operational weather forecasting and data research analysis. If you haven’t guessed, this isn’t exactly the weather app for the average citizen seeking little more than local temps and precipitation. Long story short, meteorologists and storm tracking enthusiasts are going to love this app for the true radial weather radar data, as well as a long list of active weather warnings to choose from.

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