A new way to display weather on your mobile phone, from Google

Google weather for mobile phonesI enjoy reading about, monitoring, and used to enjoy teaching weather to firefighters, until most of the standardized courses became canned on slide/tapes, video tapes, and finally DVD’s.

So I was intrigued when Google announced today that they have developed a new interface for displaying weather conditions and forecasts (sound familiar?) on mobile phones. It is available to anyone who simply searches for the term “weather” on their iPhone or Android-powered device.

From my testing it is not quite ready for prime time, but it’s worth checking out.

It features a slider that will display the following at any time over the next 12 hours: temperature, relative humidity, chance of precipitation, sky conditions, and wind speed.

There appear to be two different ways for the software to determine your location — automatically from your mobile phone network (“use my location”), or you can manually enter the location. In my case, the default “use my location” came up with a location that is about 25 miles away, but that is a problem I have always had with my auto-location feature on my Verizon phone. For some reason the cell signal from phones in my city bounces around before it finally settles into the Verizon network. You may have better luck with your location and mobile phone carrier. I did not see a method to force the program to use the phone’s GPS to determine my location, which would be better than all of the above.

When you “click” “Choose a location” you can enter the name of your city, or a zip code. I even tried entering the lat/long in this format: w 110.00, n 45.00 and it worked.

One strange glitch I discovered is that the current temperature and RH changed when I rotated the phone from portrait to landscape. In portrait mode the temperature was 30 degrees, but in landscape mode it was 33. And the RH changed from 37% to 32%. So this casts doubt on all of the numbers on the screen.

Google does an amazing amount of innovation, and I applaud them for developing this interface, but obviously it needs a little tweaking before it can be depended on by wildland firefighters.

Typos, let us know HERE, and specify which article. Please read the commenting rules before you post a comment.

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire.

4 thoughts on “A new way to display weather on your mobile phone, from Google”

  1. I’ve had great luck using the Weather Bug app for my android phone. There are many gov and civ weather stations on their network allowing for forecasts based off data much closer to your actual location. And the radar feature is a life saver.

    0
    0
  2. I had the same issue. Portrait it was a cloudy, grey day humidity 82% and temp 30. In landscape Humidity was 86%, it was partly sunny but temp was the same. My question is, how did you capture the image you used above to post it? sometimes I want to tweet or put a weather update on FB, but other than taking a picture of my phone and emailing it to myself, I can’t do it.

    0
    0
    1. Kris – I got the image from the Google site. I researched methods for screen capture on Android phones, and came to the conclusion that it is difficult or impossible unless you “root” your phone, which voids your warranty; or, I believe if you are an Android developer, there is a way to get a screen capture with developer software. However, it’s easy to do with an iPhone, for which it’s built into the operating system.

      0
      0

Comments are closed.