MeteoBlue Compared To Weather Underground For Daily Forecast Information

By: Leonard Lenny Vasbinder

October 21, 2020

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Since I have an off-grid solar system, I like to know how much sun I will be getting each day so I will know if I should be more stingy with my power use or if I'll have to plug into the grid, or when RV'ing, have to run my generator.

Obviously, where I am located in the New Orleans burbs, I pretty much have sun from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the Fall/Winter and a couple hours more during the Spring/Summer but I also use MeteoBlue Weather and Weather Underground for forecasts because they both give information about how much actual sun I'll be getting that day and included in the 7-10 day forecasts.  

Here is MeteoBlue's screenshot. Besides all of the usual weather info, there is the Sun icon with how many hours of sun each day.  For Wednesday, it shows "Sun Icon 7 h" for seven hours of sun.  The next day is only four hours, then zero hours, etc.  I'm presuming they are factoring in the cloud cover, rain, etc.

Here is the Weather Underground 10-day forecast.  While it doesn't show an actual time for how much sun, there is the bottom graph that shows how much cloud cover, the chance of rain, etc. that they forecast with the gray color on the graph indicating clouds.

Hope this helps some other off-grid solar system users.

Weather & Emergency Weather Alert App And Website Recommendations

By: Leonard Lenny Vasbinder
June 25, 2020, New Orleans, LA

Over the years, I've used many different weather apps on my phone and different websites on my computer.

Recently, I've been considering a weather radio but started checking out a few of the available FREE apps on the Play Store for my Android phone. 

After trying a few and having to wait for actual bad weather -- fortunately, there have been three days of all-day bad weather and thunderstorms the past few days -- but so far, I like the "Tornado" app from the American Red Cross. Reading the reviews from other users show there are some things that could use some tweaking like having the piercing alert come on even if you have your phone set to vibrate or silent mode. I rarely do that so it worked fine for me.

You can set it to follow your location settings or just set it to a particular city. Then you can expand the warning circumference for that city and whenever there is an alert for bad weather or a tornado, a rather loud, almost piercing sound blasts from your phone.

You can read more about the Tornado App here -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.tfa&hl=en_US 

My "go-to" weather websites and apps are Weather Underground -- www.wunderground.com and MeteoBlue -- www.meteoblue.com.  One of the different but very good features of MeteoBlue is that it gives you the forecast but then also gives their probability percentages for each day of the forecast. They call it "Predictability" which is the Yellow row.

In other words, as shown in the below screen snip, they have tomorrow's forecast as a 20% chance of rain and they'll have that as 75% Predictability rating and today's forecast is a 65% chance of rain with a 55% Predictability rating -- so they're giving you their forecast based on their interpretation of the available data but they are giving you their Predictability assessment as to how accurate they think they are with that day's forecast.




As far as Weather Underground, their website's 10-day forecast gives you good information at a glance but there is no Predictability feature so you have to presume they are 100% confident in their forecast (Subscribe and follow this blog and my "News" blog LennysNewsAndViews.blogspot.com  for an upcoming article showing how inaccurate most 10-day forecasts really are). There are also tabs for other forecasts and for the WunderMap which is a very good live radar map with customizable features for the data you want to be displayed.