Weather UI

Weather in Montreal this winter has been so fickle. We’ve had several snow storms already (the kind where it takes a week for an equipped city to clear >_<). The temperature varies from week to week, sometimes freezing around −30° C (−22° F), sometimes warm up to +12° C (+53° F). Even weirder is when this happens on consecutive weeks. With the weather shifting dramatically like this, we also get rain (being cold and wet is not fun), freezing rain (which really sucks; recall the ridiculous ice storm of 98?), and slush (worse thing in winter).

One would expect weather news sites to be intuitive at presenting information. Unfortunately, they are not, but that didn’t bother me, since I mainly use ForecastFox, a browser add-on.

^_^ Until I saw this Japanese weather site! The information is compactly displayed, as well as being pleasing to the eye. The art style is just cheerful enough to keep me going on a rainy day, I am certain.

I want to use this site, notwithstanding the language! Navigating without understanding the Japanese was not frustrating at all; it was actually enjoyable to explore (the reward of a streaming video for the weather guy/girl in 3 different langages was entertaining). The controls in the top left corner are pretty easy to grasp, with the forecast, temperatures, and wind velocity, and a 7-days forecast. It feels like a design Apple would do. I never felt lost. And I don’t begrudge that it is implemented in Flash.

There are other portals part of this network, but they seem to serve a different purpose. Hehe, I tried to see if there was an English version for Canada. ;_; None.

weathernews.jp has supplanted the 6 Weather site as my favorite (haven’t looked at this since my budding interest for standards-compliant/CSS-based table-less layouts/Zen Garden stuff just because I do not live in Kansas ^_^).

Are there other intuitive weather sites I’ve missed?