The Last Weather App Post

For regular readers you know we have been looking at the variety of weather apps available for the IPad. We've looked at general weather apps that look a lot like the weather you can get on TV. Today we'll take a look at more advanced (or too advanced) apps. These focus either on doppler radar or computer weather forecasting models.

You may remember we took a look at how Doppler radar works a few days ago. It is not all that easy to interpret raw Doppler feeds so most weather apps give you a composite Doppler feed of reflectivity which indirectly measures precipitation or a mosaic of several Doppler radars to show you a large weather front. What you don't normally get is up to the minute weather information. That's something you might want if a tornado warning was in effect, and with the regional radar just a few miles away we should be able to get it.

My favorite of the upscale apps is Weather+. This allows you to create a weather map of the world!! As I write this there is rain here and a heavy rain in the central Amazon. Tomorrow that spot in the Amazon will be sunny at this time. Weather+ draws on weather models from supercomputers to create these maps with a five day look ahea, but instead of burying you with complicated information you get the basics-temperature, barometric pressure, cloud cover, and precipitation. And if you don't need to know it's going to be raining in Ethiopia tomorrow night, you can focus on the New England area. The forecasts in this app are updated in three hour intervals so that every three hours you get a picture of the actual weather. The only drawback of this app is that it only uses celsius and metric measurements

An app called Hi-Def Radar gives you an animated view of the composite Doppler feed from Taunton (or whatever radar you want) for the last hour or so. It is updated every five minutes so it very useful for tracking approaching thunderstorms. Because it is a composite radar view it can show precipitation that isn't actually reaching the ground. 

A similar app is RadarUS. This gives you some choice of what to look at including infrared satellite radar that shows cloud cover, base reflectivity, composite reflectivity, echo tops, and storm total precipitation. Some of these reach back four or five hours and move forward to between 5 and 10 minutes ago. The range of choices and the animation make this a great app to learn about Doppler forecasting. You can range through the maps, make up your own forecast and then test your hypothesis by using NOAA's predicted Doppler weather, the best feature of this app.

The closest you can come to actually sitting at the radar in Taunton is a $10 app called RadarScope. This is my other favorite in this group of apps.  It allows you access to all the products of NOAA including each of the four "tilts" for base reflectivity or velocity. Since Taunton has recently upgraded to new SuperDoppler radar, you can get that feed also. These feeds are updated whenever you select a particular feed. All the caveats about using Doppler radar apply to the raw feeds here, but if you want to be a meteorologist, this is the app you want.

The most complex app  I'll mention is Instant Weather Maps Pro. This is not the easiest app in the world to use. A good set of instructions would really help. At any rate, if you've ever heard your TV weather person say the computer models are conflicting, this is the app that lets you look at the predictions of the conflicting models. Unfortunately things you can access like SREF or NAM or GEFS Spaghetti is not explained. You'll need a course in weather forecasting to use this one. A simpler version of this mapping app is called Pocket Grib because it downloads GRIB files that create an old fashioned weather map with five day forecast model.

If you love weather, the apps presented over the last few days (and a fair amount of studying) will take you from weather info consumer to creating your own forecasts.