So far, we’ve taken a look at two great weather websites: the Weather Underground and Intellicast. Both are great sites, but there are other notable ones out there, too. No weather site is perfect, and it’s pretty good advice to use multiple sites for all their strengths, like the Weather Underground for current conditions and local storm tracking and Intellicast for current conditions maps. There are literally dozens (and perhaps hundreds) of weather sites out there, not even including non-American ones (as a side note, all of the reviews in this series are geared for American audiences. Sometime in the future, I will start reviewing websites for foreign countries as well.)
The thing about it is, out of all those dozens of websites, there are only a small handful that are really worth your time – that offer more than just conditions and a forecast, but really good miscellaneous features. With that, let’s move on to weather website number…
- 3. Weather.com
Ah, The Weather Channel. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the United States that has not heard of it. The cable and satellite network, launched in May of 1982, has been the source of weather pages for newspapers, current conditions and forecasts for radio stations, and data for local TV stations for years. When the Internet really started taking off in the early 1990s, they jumped on the bandwagon and started a website, known simply as “weather.com”.
So how does weather.com stack up against the Weather Underground and Intellicast?
Well, the homepage is nice and neat, which, as you know by now, is something I give automatic points for. What I like about weather.com is the inclusion of more “weather news” stories then Intellicast and the Weather Underground, though all of them have weather news to some extent. As noted in the WU post, they have blogs from weather professionals. Also neat is how weather.com offers video of everything from the weather news stories to forecasts for specific regions.
Weather.com offers a smorgasbord of weather maps, from radars to current surface (conditions) to “yesterday-today” temperature differences. The maps are all cleanly made and easy on the eyes, like Intellicast’s. As for current conditions when you look up your area, it’s just airports again. Forecasts offered are a ten-day one, hourly, tomorrow, and one for the upcoming weekend. You can also look back on the conditions for the previous day and the days in your current month prior to the day you check it. A neat little widget on the current conditions page gives you a “comfort index” for exercise outdoors, a cool feature.
Below the current conditions for your area is a local radar map, clickable to access the Interactive Weather Map feature weather.com offers. The interactive map offers radar, satellite, a few elements of current conditions (temperature, dew points, etc), and a radar/satellite combo. You can zoom the map and observe local storms and look at your region’s satellite and such, but there really ain’t much to say about this one. It’s fairly mediocre compared to Intellicast’s and does not even come within a hundred miles of the greatness of the Weather Underground’s interactive map. Weather.com also offers this feature called “future radar”, which is supposed to show where storms and precip are gonna be within the next couple hours, but all it does is blur the radar and push the storms in the direction that they were going previously. It’s just clunky and ugly. They do get points for the inclusion of the radar/satellite, though, cause a good product like that is actually rare.
Weather.com offers some sections for things like driving and travel and such, too, but overall there ain’t much to say about this site except that its strong features are video and weather news. For anything else, the Weather Underground and Intellicast, and probably the site(s) I mention in the rest of this series, beat weather.com out. The next post will tackle the more serious and straightforward website of the National Weather Service.
Overall Grade: C+
Misfit Manor 