[John_V]

A while back, someone posted about a free app called Rain Alarm that warned you when rain is within a specific distance from you. Well, a friend of mine told me about this app that goes hand in hand with Rain Alarm. Wind Alert is a free iPhone, Android app that reports wind information from surrounding weather stations. There are two upgrades ($$) that give even more data if it's something you really need.

The main screen shows all the weather stations in your area.


Touch a weather station and get a quick menu. BTW, the dark green area under the selected weather station is the park where I do my daily rides.


Selecting Graph shows you the past and current wind data for today.


Selecting Forecast displays the forecast in a horizontal line chart.


Selecting More gives you more options (some require paid version).


Main Menu screen.


If you ride in a windy area, this app is a wealth of knowledge. Enjoy!






Sent from my iPhone using Bike Forum

 

[rola643]

I've used Windfinder Pro for quite some time. Not necessarily for the bike but I have referenced it on a few questionable days.

Main screen:



Once you click on a favorite:


In conjunction I also use Buoy data :


My favorite and most used:






All important info if you play on the water!

So John, now I have the free app as well and see how it compares. I may find more benefit from this for work than fun

Thanks for posting

 

[John_V]

Rola,

The interface on your app is really nice. Since I don't have a boat, I don't have the paid version of Wind Alert so I don't know what other information is available on it. I would be curious to hear what you found out to be the differences in the two apps.

 

[rola643]

Just looking very quickly, for what I use, I prefer Windfinder. I say that because I tap on a favorite and I see pretty much everything I need for a day out in the bay on the boat. Wind alert seems to want to make me go to several different screens to get the same data.

Of course it's hard to give an honest opinion after 10 minutes of playing around with it. What did they used to say? A tv show has about 3 seconds for the avg person scanning the channels before they move on? I guess the point of me saying that was if the average user doesn't see what they want relatively quickly they are moving on as well.

 

[John_V]

Just looking very quickly, for what I use, I prefer Windfinder. I say that because I tap on a favorite and I see pretty much everything I need for a day out in the bay on the boat. Wind alert seems to want to make me go to several different screens to get the same data.

Of course it's hard to give an honest opinion after 10 minutes of playing around with it. What did they used to say? A tv show has about 3 seconds for the avg person scanning the channels before they move on? I guess the point of me saying that was if the average user doesn't see what they want relatively quickly they are moving on as well.

Thanks for the comparison. I just started using Wind Alert a few days ago so I really haven't had anything to compare it to, like WindFinder. A nice feature about Wind Alert, that I like, is that all the weather stations are shown on the map no matter where you move it to. Next to each weather station, is the wind speed. If you want more data, you just tap the weather station and it shows the menu for that station. And like WindFinder, you can set up Favorites so you just tap on one of your favorite locations and it brings up the map with the weather stations in that area.

I'm going to play with it for a few weeks and see how it works out. If it doesn't, I'll give WindFinder a try.

 

[rola643]

Looking at the wind for today I stumbled across this, pretty cool really.
See current wind, weather, ocean, and pollution conditions, as forecast by supercomputers, on an interactive animated map. Updated every three hours.
https://earth.nullschool.net/
Gonna be a fun ride this morning. If you look very closely you can see my current position marked by the green circle

 

[rola643]

Plenty of wind mappers out there nowadays
https://www.windy.com/37.397/-76.360?37.038,-76.701,8,m:eHuad1S

Another cool one called Windy from the apple store Kind of like this one best, suits all of my needs on one screen.