A personal weather station is a sensor in somebody's backyard. There are a lot of them, often far closer to you than the nearest airport, and Forecast Bar can read them. Follow the ones around you to see what your own part of town is actually doing right now, or connect your own station and it sets your current conditions and tunes the forecast to your spot.
Requirements
- A Gold subscription (Pro on the Mac). See Plans & Subscriptions.
- Available on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Your own station's readings and tuning also reach your widgets and Apple Watch.
- Readings come from the Weather Underground network, through The Weather Company. Nothing about your station is stored on Forecast Bar's servers.
Open it at Settings → Features → Weather Station.
Finding a station
Two ways in, both on the Weather Station screen:
- Find a Station Nearby opens a map of the personal stations around your location, each with its current reading and how far away it is. Tap one to see its last 24 hours, then Follow This Station.
- I Have My Own Station takes a Weather Underground station ID — it looks like
KCASANFR1767, and it's on your WU dashboard or in your station's own app. Most stations can share to Weather Underground, including Ambient, Ecowitt, Davis, AcuRite and Tempest. Tap Look Up to confirm the ID is reporting before you add it.
Each station in the list is labelled with how much to trust it: Agrees with its neighbors · passes WU checks is the best case, and Out of step with neighbors means its readings disagree with the stations around it. You can still follow one that's flagged — every reading is checked, and anything that looks wrong is marked.
Followed stations and your own station
The distinction matters, because only one of them changes your forecast:
- Followed stations are for reference. They show you what's happening a few streets away and change nothing about your forecast.
- Your own station sets your current conditions and tunes your forecast.
If one of the stations you follow is yours, open it and turn on This Is My Station. The same menu has Rename and Remove Station.
How It's Used
Once a station is marked as yours, the How It's Used card appears:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Use for Current Conditions | Your station's live reading replaces the forecast's current conditions |
| Tune My Forecast | Adjusts the coming hours and each day's high and low by what your station has learned about your spot |
| Applies Within | How close to the station you have to be for either of those to apply — half a mile up to ten miles, two miles to start with. Farther away, you get the forecast as usual |
Tune My Forecast needs Use for Current Conditions on first, and it isn't instant: it learns. Your Microclimate on the same screen shows the progress as Day 1 of 4, and after a few hours of readings it starts showing how much warmer or cooler your spot runs than the forecast at each hour of the day, over the last three weeks.
Station vs. Forecast
Station vs. Forecast answers the obvious question about all of this — is it actually helping?
- Is Tuning Helping? compares the average miss over each forecast's next 12 hours, with tuning and without it, across every hour checked.
- The Last Week puts your station's daily highs and lows beside The Weather Company's, day by day.
- The Last 24 Hours does the same hour by hour.
Explore Your City's Microclimates
Explore Your City's Microclimates is the map version, and it needs no station of your own. It draws every station around you as one field, so you can see which neighborhoods run warm and which run cool.
- Mode switches between Now, which is live, and Typical, which is how your area usually runs at this hour.
- Show switches between Relative — warmer or cooler than the area as a whole — and Actual temperatures.
- The last two days can be replayed, and the whole view can be shared as a card.
Note: The same microclimate data is published as city pages on the web. If you want to look at a city you're not in, try forecastbar.com/microclimates/.
