Dark Sky — When Weather Matters

The estimated reading time for this post is 4 minutes

If you’re the type of person who cares about the weather (and most of us do at least some days), then you’ll enjoy a weather app called Dark Sky that’s loaded with cool and useful features. Keeping up with the weather has never been easier.

Dark Sky is an iOS app that has been recently updated to make it even more useful. This app can give you weather in your immediate area or anywhere in the world. You can set custom alerts to be notified when weather is changing and see a graph of the weather for your day and week ahead.

Weather Forecasts

Dark Sky gives you hyperlocal weather forecasts, telling you the temperature and any precipitation where you are. You get hourly information for the day and can see the high and low temperature for the day. You’ll also see when the sun will set and how long until that event occurs.

You can see what’s ahead for your day with hourly forecasts of:

• Percent chance of precipitation
• Temperature
• Wind
• Humidity
• UV index

You can see the weekly forecast for your location by swiping to the left.

Alerts

If you’re the type of person who likes to keep on top of weather conditions, you’ll appreciate the alerts you can set with Dark Sky. You can set Dark Sky to alert you:

• Next Hour Precipitation so you can be alerted if there will be precipitation in your area within the hour.
• A Daily Summary of the forecast for the day, delivered to your phone at the time you select.
• Severe Weather Alerts notify you of government issued severe weather alerts and warnings.

You can also set Custom Alerts with Dark Sky about wind speed, snowfall, UV index, humidity and more.

Dark Sky alerts worked perfectly for me as I was writing this article. I got an alert that heavy rain was starting soon. Sure enough, a massive storm hit our area, knocking out electricity for days. (Okay, it was more like hours but it felt like days!)

Weather Around the World

Another very cool feature of Dark Sky is how it displays weather around the world. Swipe to the screen farthest on the left to see an interactive image of the Earth. Spin the globe to see the weather around the world. You can view both temperature and precipitation around the world on a time line ranging from the past 12 hours to the future 12 hours.

Spin the globe down to Antarctica where it’s winter and see how cold it is. I told you it was a cool feature. (Ha!) Then spin the globe to India and see how hot it is there. You can have loads of fun checking out weather around the world!

Reporting

The latest update to Dark Sky lets app users report their weather conditions to improve the speed and accuracy of weather information. Tap on Report to report current conditions and whether you have lightning or fog in your area.

You can also allow the app to send periodic information of pressure data if you have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.

Apple Watch App

You can use Dark Sky as an Apple Watch app. You can see the current conditions at your location and see what weather events will be happening in the next hour.

The home screen of the app shows you:

• sunrise and sunset times,
• high and low temperatures for the day,
• humidity
• wind speed,
• visibility,
• UV index,
• dew point,
• barometric pressure (for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus)

Swipe to the left to see a second screen that shows you a graph of temperature and precipitation for the day.

Today Screen Widget

You can also use Dark Sky as a widget in your today screen. The widget will show you what will happen with the weather within the next hour.

Availability

Dark Sky is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch from the iTunes App Store for $3.99. Dark Sky in iTunes

This price may be considered expensive for an app, but when you think about Dark Sky as a latte, the price seems very reasonable. After all, Dark Sky is an app you can keep for a long time and may well warn you of dangerous weather events. That latte will be forgotten tomorrow and is rather useless at saving your life.

Dark Sky works in the US and the British Isles. If you’re interested in having Dark Sky be available in your country, or on Android, Windows Phone, or your computer, send your request to the developers at the Dark Sky Support Page.

Your Thoughts

Does weather matter to you? Would you like to spin the globe around to see weather across the Earth? What alerts would you use with Dark Sky? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments section below!

* Clouds image (edited) courtesy of pblarson via Flickr and Creative Commons

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I’m thrilled to be a guest on the Going Home with Tony show this afternoon. Check out the radio show today at 5:00 pm CDT to hear Tony Scimeca’s interview with me and hear us discuss tech and how it’s changing both our lives and society. You can listen by going to Going Home with Tony on TuneIn Radio or his weekly podcast on iTunes.