The weather is something that is closely watched on Irish farms. Odile Evans takes a look at some handy weather apps that can help you work around your local conditions. Gone are the days of downing tools to run in for the six one news just to get the weather forecast – nowadays there’s an app for that! You can actually find out what the weather is going to throw at you by consulting your smartphone or tablet at any time of the day or night. And the beauty of this is that it gives a much more detailed description of what to expect in your local area rather than an overview of the whole country.
Here is a review of three free weather apps:
Mobile Met
The Met Eireann app, which can be found at m.met.ie, is really easy to use and can be installed in a matter of seconds. It is essentially a website tailored for smart phones and mobile devices, meaning that it doesn’t take forever to load when you don’t have a high speed internet connection. Its display is very clear and easy to read and understand. Features include weather warnings, latest hourly weather reports, sea area forecasts and text forecasts. However in terms of accuracy of weather in your location it is limited by the fact that when setting your region you can only specify what county you are in and your closest weather station.
Mobile Met can be found on the Met Eireann website and can be downloaded from Google Play or the App store.
Yr
Designed by Norwegian Meteorological Institute the Yr app offers incredibly detailed hour by hour and week long forecasts for your own townland. The app allows you to save a number of places that you would like to check on a regular basis, making it easier to switch between your favourite locations. A particularly useful feature to this app is the charted hourly projections which illustrate the rise and fall of the sun over the course of the day along with wind direction and speed, temperature and expected levels of precipitation for each hour. The chart is an excellent addition to this app but may perhaps be considered difficult to see on a small screen without zooming in. If using a tablet, however, it works really well.
Yr can be found on the website yr.no and can be downloaded from Google Play for Android users or the App store if using an Apple device.
XC weather
XC weather is a UK app that also offers relatively accurate projections for a specific area. While it may not be able to find your townland it will locate your local village/town. Again, you can have a number of locations that you regularly check on saved on the app and you just have to swipe to the right to move to the next one. The main screen gives the current temperature and also what that temperature actually feels like due to prevailing conditions. It also gives a summary and tells you when it was last updated. Upon touching the name of the location you are looking at it will give you a summary of the forecast for the next four days. If you tap on a specific day it will tell you what the expected temperature is for every three hours and uses a weather icon to indicate whether there will be sunshine, rain, clouds etc.
XC weather can be found on the XC website or by searching for ‘XC weather’ on Google Play or the App store.
(Source – Irish Farmers Journal – 06/06/2015)