Which online Weather forecast should I use
- tonylowe1
- Apr 17
- 3 min read
For a long time Mountain Forecast was my go to webpage/App for looking at the forecast for the mountains, but this week they have started charging for for you to see forecasts which go beyond the current day, the cost is now £3.99 a month or you can pay £24.99 a year (making it £2.49 a month).
Everyone has their favourite go to sites of course and a lot of people swear by Met office or MWIS (or miserably weather information service as I call it) but I use a few different sites and then take the average across them all to see what weather should be occurring on my Mountain Day.
Below I write about my 3 favourite forecasting tools online that are my go to when planning a day out.
Ventusky https://www.ventusky.com/
Ventusky is a fantastic animated live weather forecasting page and App, the name comes from Latin Ventu meaning wind and English word sky, it takes its meteorological data from NOAA which is the National Oceanic and atmospheric administration in USA and the DWD which is the German Deutscher Wetterdienst (a great site on its own)
The radar layers it uses also has several other country specific sources one being the Met office, all sources can be found here https://my.ventusky.com/guide/help/data-sources-2/
On Ventusky you can see live radar predictions for the following
Temperature, Feels like Temp, Precipitation, Air Pressure, Clouds, Wind Speed, Wind Gusts, Air Pressure, Thunderstorms, Snow Cover and air quality.
On a lot of these options you also have the choice of choosing how high above ground level you want the forecast, for example wind speeds you can start at 10m above ground and go as high as 30000m above ground
For cloud cover you have the following choices to choose from, total cloud cover, fog, low clouds, middle clouds, high clouds, cloud base and visibility.
All the above can be seen in one hour forecasts or 3 hourly forecasts. There is a premium service of course, on this you can have hourly notifications, advanced widgets and layers plus more, but I feel the free version is more than sufficient.
Ventusky are on all social media pages and post regularly, at the time of writing they warned us of Saharan dust moving across Europe (15th April) and the next morning my car was covered in it.
YR is a Norwegian weather forecasting tool, it is a collaboration between NRK (Norwegian broadcasting) and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute.
Even though it mostly forecasts for Norway on it's map options it will give you a dedicated forecast for British Mountains upto 9 days in advance.
On the forecast it shows Temps, Precipitation and wind speeds. even though it does not have as much detail as Ventusky I still find it a very reliable forecasting tool.
It also has a free App and I find this a great user friendly App for a quick glance at the weather conditions, you swipe right to see the forecast hour by hour of that day, the App also shows you the hourly UV forecast and sunrise / sunset times.
Windy https://www.windy.com
Windy is another weather forecasting tool which shows an animated map to show you the weather. Like Ventusky it shows you the usual charts in rain, cloud, winds speeds etc.
But the bonus of Windy is that on the free version you can also see weather layers for things like dew point, humidity, UV index, pressure even things like City heat maps, solar and precipitation type, all this is free. Surprisingly these days the webpage is better and more user friendly than the app.
With windy webpage I really like the way the weather is displayed, it has the map then a below a chart showing the temp, rain, wind, wind gusts and wind direction. All these are colour coded for strength so high winds are shown in red with the wind speeds.
It also has info about your location showing coordinates, sunrise time, sunset time, dusk time and elevation.
There is a premium option which includes 10 day forecast, updates 4 times a day and more detailed forecasts, but again as mentioned above the free version is more than sufficient for a day on the mountains.
All the above post on facebook and ventusky also posts on Instagram. Following these pages gives you a great insight into the weather around the world, you can follow trends and see some really interesting data and information.
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