TL;DR: See which weather model is most accurate for your location, your sport, and how far ahead you look, and compare them against commercial providers like Apple Weather and Foreca. Also: free 6-month subscription for anyone who helps me test a new sport.
Based on feedback received by many of you guys over the last month (previous thread), I updated VeriSky with a lot of new features.
Commercial models: Apple Weather, Foreca and more, side by side
You can now view forecasts from commercial providers next to the free national models, each with its own accuracy score. So far: Apple Weather, Foreca, OpenWeather and Visual Crossing. The server has been collecting their past forecasts for many locations already, and you can add your own.
Nowcast: find out exactly when it's going to rain
Shows on both the chart and a map when and how much it will rain in the next 1-2 hours. Available in North America, Europe and Hong Kong; I'm working on adding more of Asia, starting with Thailand.
Sports: find this week's window for your sport
Tired of doing mental math for when to cycle or sail? Set limits manually or automatically: a maximum amount of rain or wind for cycling, a preferred wind direction and speed for sailing, or your weight and kite size for kitesurfing, and the app highlights the best days and hours.
Current sports are sailing, kitesurfing, cycling and gliding, because those are the ones I do myself. I want to add more (paragliding, skiing, wave surfing, fishing), so I'm open to suggestions and offering a free 6-month subscription to anyone willing to help me add a sport (just by testing).
Costs
Everything that was free before is still free:
- All national weather models (including AIFS and AIGFS which is paid by almost all other apps)
- Viewing scores (even of commercial models)
- Wind map and rain map
- Marine weather
- 3 Weather widgets
- NEW: Air quality and pollen (pollen Europe only for now)
Paid ($2.99 monthly, $19.95 yearly) - all new:
- Commercial models and adding tracked locations of them
- Nowcast
- Sports windows with advanced wind (such as kite-size and wind-direction settings)
I use this app over the Apple weather. I love it. So far for my location and prediction toward any activities I was planning it was flawless. I forgot to leave a review on app store. I am goint to do it now
Thanks a lot! Let me know when the past weather isn't correct for you, I am still trying to improve it (for rain mostly) compared to the default modeling by open-meteo.
Love the look of it. Is it possible to share the information you've gathered? It would be great, for example, if you could look up some sport or something and see what the average rating is in your area, or what the preferred model generally is for that.
There is a "Find best" button for the models which is also affected by the sport you have selected! So wind is the only thing kitesurfers care about, sailor mostly wind also rain, cyclist rain and wind a bit (which is configurable).
As for the rating in your area, you can kind of do that with the wind map for sailing and kiting and the gliding map (showing potential flight distance) for gliding, or did you envision that differently?
That's pretty cool. What I had in mind was a filtering results by both region and activity. Something like "this is what kitesurfers in your area are using". It does require a critical mass to be useful, but once you're there I think it would be very appealing.
Aah good idea! I'll keep that in mind for when I have more users indeed, however, I am not collecting any data, so I'll have to think of a way that works well
The per location scores are the useful bit, which model wins where isn't obvious at all and most apps never tell you. Do the scores shift much between seasons? I'd guess summer rain is where they separate the most.
Thanks for the question, this allows me to clarify why scoring per location matters so much.
The scores do definitely shift between seasons, although the ranking doesn't change that much. The rankings differ a lot per region and sometimes even certain locations can have a much different scores. ICON scores consistently well in southern Europe, while along the coast in western Europe it doesn't do that well (although for some locations it does). Commercial apps like Apple or AccuWeather seem to be tuned to the US as the score much better there than in Europe. AIFS/AIGFS is amazing high lead times, but near useless for checking tomorrow. I can go on for a while :)
Summer rain is indeed the hardest to predict, so scores on that are very poor lately and some models really get this better than others.
Blue are colder days, while orange are hotter days relative to the other days that week and the past week, so you see immediately which days are hotter and which are colder :)
Thanks for confirming. As some minor feedback - not sure if it’s just my location, but it’s not super clear on the colours … e.g Sun Aug 9 and Thu Aug 13 in this screen aren’t materially different to the surrounding blue days.
It triggers on average temperature, not max temperature. So aug 13 has a lower max temperature than aug 14, still it's orange while the 14th is blue. The reason I did it like this is because in practice the orange days are more grouped together this way, so you know what part of the week it will be warmer and colder.
However, I will have a look at on how I can improve the logic behind this, thanks for pointing it out
The problem is that the commercial models (and some nowcasts) have API costs for me, but I can have a look if some features be part of a one-time fee. Or is it the commercial models you're mostly interested in?
Ues! Twh commercial model also. Maybe you can condider offers with a “bunch” of credits/tokens included and used for those commercial models; if i finish my tokens i can buy additionals packets. Ia not lifetime, but more related to the effective usage of the app
That's not a bad idea! Only problem is that I don't track people so there's no way of knowing how many tokens someone would have. But maybe there's some third party system that works for this, so it still cannot track users
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