Find the Most Accurate Weather Service Wherever You Are With ForecastAdvisor
It’s a shame that Dark Sky is going away for some people – whether you’re an Android user or depending on a service API for your own personalized weather settings, like the Home Assistant map. But maybe from the very beginning it was not the best weather service?
I’m not saying this to give a shit about Dark Sky; this is a great app and great weather service. However, the place where you live is different from where I live, and there may be apps that predict the forecast even more accurately than many people just claimed to be “the best weather app.”
To find the best weather service for where you live, try ForecastAdvisor , the gem of the site we featured back in 2006 . I didn’t know this site existed until I stumbled upon it yesterday when I was researching alternatives to Dark Sky , and it’s useful enough for your day to day life to warrant its special mention.
The site is easy to use. You enter your zip code or a combination of city and state, and in return you get a quick five-day forecast. However, this is not nearly as interesting as other data that ForecastAdvisor offers: the site also details which of the major weather services were most accurate in predicting your local weather conditions for the previous month and the same time period a year earlier. This is useful if you want to see who has improved or got worse at their divination game.
I also love ForecastAdvisor’s advanced analysis, which can be found using the tiny “Further Analysis of Accuracy” link in the lower right corner; click on it for more information on which weather service deserves your attention the most.
I suspect you won’t find a ton of variance between Top Five: The Weather Channel, Weather Underground, AccuWeather, Dark Sky, and Foreca. I would probably stick with one of them – or at least an app that connects to one of them – if I were looking for a new source of weather updates.
As far as which app might work best for you, it depends on how much variance you see in your ForecastAdvisor report. If your favorite application is using a service that is only a few percent of the most accurate, I wouldn’t bother. You don’t have to go over your life or app habits for a service that can only marginally better predict your weather through, say, an annoying user interface.