Smartphone Weather Applications

Software applications (apps) downloaded to your Smartphone are a fairly new development. We found most of them had better graphics and displayed weather detail in a more appealing way than mobile web pages. There are lots of products on the market but depending on your phone platform and service provider you might be limited to just a few options. The good news is that the most prominent weather providers on the internet have both free and fee based applications across several phone platforms. The best search results for weather Smartphone apps will be found by searching the web store or market on your phone. We did a lot of searching on the web but many of the developers are small and do not have the web presence that will generate enough hits to put them high in the web rankings.

Recommendation: Try out the free options from several providers such as The Weather Channel, Accuweather and our free option best-pick WeatherBug on your phone.

There are few Marine Weather Smartphone apps on the market. The ones that you can find are predominantly on the iPhone platform and range in price from $2.99 to $5.99. Many Marine Weather apps just take the NOAA weather data and reformat it to display on a smartphone screen. Once you have selected your weather area many of the apps will remember this and when relaunched they will provide the region’s weather as the default.

Tip: Get a free weather app to cover your daily needs and select a marine weather app just to focus on marine forecasts and buoy reports.

MarineCast ($5.99) on the iPhone platform provided a graphical map display of marine weather that we found incredibly useful. For a given area, select a dataset such as radar or tide level and scroll through forecast maps in one-hour increments to see the predicted change. Mobile Mariner ($4.99/mo) on the Blackberry RIM platform can display historic buoy data and marine weather forecast. Historic buoy data such as wind, water temperature, and tide level are shown as line graphs to identify trends. Programming several NOAA stations as default locations can help present a regional weather outlook with specific data.

MarineCast Wind Vector Forecasts enables you to scroll through several forecasts to see the hour by hour change of wind strength and direction.