WeatherBomb is a fancy weather app for Android that highlights weather trends
When you search for weather on Google Play you come up with thousands of results. Most apps you find here show you the current and forecast temperature, and maybe some other information such as wind strength or precipitation.
The Android app WeatherBomb does all that, but adds to it large scale weather trend maps. The first thing you need to do after installation is to add at least one location that you want to retrieve weather information for.
To do so click on the menu button and then places in the context menu. Tap on default location to modify it. You can either enter longitude and latitude here, or use the search to find a place that you are interested in.
Make sure you add additional data packs to that location. By default, only rain, wind and cloud cover are included. You can add a pro pack (free) that adds temperature, pressure and humidity, and a waves pack (free) which adds wave height information on top of it.
The application divides the data into two main parts. The lower part is made up of a weather map that is showing the currently selected data. You can swipe to the left or right to see how it changes over time. The map is powered by Google Maps so that you can easily zoom in or out a specific location.
A tap on the current data (rain in the above screenshot) displays all other data types that you can select based on the packs that you have added to the location during setup. The explanation at the bottom helps you understand what is shown on the screen.
The top displays the temperature, precipitation and wind strength, as well as a rain, cloud and wind graph for every hour of the next seven days.
You can use your finger to go through the data to pick a specific point in time that you want to look up weather information for.
Weather data comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. While it is often precise, it turns out to be not at other times. The author has plans to introduce other weather data sources to the app in the near future to improve the overall accuracy of the application.
Tips
- You can change formats and units, e.g. temperature from Celsius to Fahrenheit or the time format from 12 hour to 24 hour, in the apps' settings.
- Here you can also enable high resolution maps. The author notes that low performance devices may run out of memory if the feature is enabled, so use with care.
Verdict
If you like to access weather trends on a map then WeatherBomb is the right application for you. It could use a couple of extra options here and there, like weather alerts or severe weather notifications.
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Great app, been using it since he intro’d the beta. Much improved with a layout unlike any other weather app. However there is so much info on screen at the same time it can be a little overwhelming. But having it all at a glance, using your finger to slide across seeing the weather update as you go, is much more intuitive.
I agree that there is a lot of noise on the screen, but you do get used to it pretty quickly.