#Best weather radar app android free#

If you have never seen the app, here is a good video comparison of Dark Sky radar to the “standard” radar views ( via the Dark Sky website): ĭark Sky has the added benefit of highly-localized (and amazingly accurate) short-term rainfall prediction and warnings that alert you to rain within the next 60 minutes for your location. With its iOS 8 update, Dark Sky is now using Mapbox map tiles, making the map itself more accurate than ever before. And since it happens on the GPU, it’s fast, resulting in the smooth animations you see. It basically uses the velocity and intensity-change data to fast-forward or rewind the storm to any arbitrary point in time (even if that time is in between radar frames). The app has an OpenGL fragment shader that reads out each piece of this data and uses it to project the storm to any particular point in time that we need. What we end up with is a crazy image format that contains not just what the storm looks like, but also information on the dynamics of the system. In the alpha channel, we stuff the intensity-change data. In the blue and green channels, we stuff the X and Y components of velocity. We do it by encoding all this data into 4-channel images which we deliver to the app: in the red channel, we stuff the intensity of the storm. We use this data in our API to make predictions, but we also use it in the app to generate the smooth animations. Part of what we have to do on the prediction side of things in our backend is generate a map of storm velocity and how the rain intensity is changing over time. Developer Adam Grossman responded via email, saying: We contacted the developers of Dark Sky to ask them just how their radar imagery is so much smoother than every other app. I dare say it makes radar animation fun to play with. The maps move smoothly, the radar data is very natural looking, it loads quickly, and allows you to easily scrub along the timeline to quickly see weather patterns as they are emerging. Though the coloring is non-traditional, the information is still easy and fast to review. The Dark Sky radar maps are completely different than every other major radar app - they are the smoothest and best looking radar animations out there. This, in large part, is why the best radar app you can get is Dark Sky. In other words: radar images look relatively bad when you compare them to any other UI element on your iOS device. Some look prettier than others, but most of the “good” radar apps just place in a better looking map while keeping the same National Weather Service (NWS) radar data on top.Īs you can see from the screenshot above, that data looks more or less like an 8-bit video game of pixellated rainbows.

Most radar apps I tested used a variation of the National Weather Service map data to show their radar maps. That public radar imagery looks something like this: What most apps won’t tell you is that, in the U.S., many of them are drawing radar data from the same source and showing you the same imagery as is publicly available on the web.

#Best weather radar app android free#

With prices ranging from free to over $9.99, it can be very hard to tell which is the best. When it comes to radar apps, there certainly is no shortage in the iOS App Store. Moreover, Dark Sky has something no other weather app has: the ability to tell the future via its highly-accurate short-term localized precipitation predictions. Dark Sky’s radar animations are smooth, fluid, and unlike any other radar app’s animations. The best radar app you can get for your iPhone is Dark Sky.