Storm Intelligence

A severe storm heading your way now runs on your Lock Screen. How likely it is to turn severe, how far out it is, and a countdown to when it reaches you — updating without you opening anything.

The countdown ticks between updates rather than sitting frozen between pushes, and the card follows the storm as it changes: strengthening, weakening, or sliding past. In the Dynamic Island it collapses to the probability alone, in the severity's colour, and expands on a long press.

The state we're most pleased with is the one that tells you to relax. When a storm is going to miss, it says so — the closest it will come, and then it gets out of your way. A weather app that only ever escalates teaches you to ignore it.

It mirrors to the Apple Watch Smart Stack, the same way precipitation alerts already do.

Radar shows you where the rain is. It does not tell you which storm in a line is the one to worry about.

Storm Cells draws every tracked cell with its probability of turning severe, read straight off NOAA's ProbSevere guidance. A squall line stops being an undifferentiated smear and becomes a row of numbers, one of which is bigger than the others.

Open a cell and you get the whole read: the severity trend, the split between hail, wind and tornado, estimated hail size, a probability sparkline from the last hour, lightning flash rate and echo top.

The same guidance is available as an alert. Severe Storm Probability and Hail Size join custom alerts — pick a distance, a probability or a hail size, and get told when a storm within that radius crosses it.

On a handful of days a year, the national outlook knows hours before the first watch is issued that your area is in trouble. Those are the only days this card appears.

It is deliberately rare. Marginal and Slight risks cover much of the country through the season, and by the time that level of risk matters the watch and warning alerts already own the moment with better information. So the card holds itself back for SPC Enhanced and above, and WPC Moderate and above — the days where the outlook genuinely leads everything else.

One line per risk, the hours it covers, and a tap that opens the radar with that outlook drawn over the map. The map overlay is not so precious: it draws every tier, because severe risk has to be read against the storms sitting inside it.

By the time a watch is issued, the day is already happening. NOAA's outlook goes out hours earlier — it is the forecaster's read on how the day could turn — and until now Forecast Bar could draw it for you but never tell you it had changed.

Now it can. Turn on Outlook Upgrades under Weather Alerts and you get told when the outlook where you are is raised.

Severe storms and flash flooding are separate switches, because they are separate products on unrelated scales: a Moderate risk of flooding and a Moderate risk of storms are not the same sentence. Both start at the level the Severe Risk card already uses, so an alert means a genuinely unusual day rather than a routine one. Move them down if you want more warning than that.

Hail damage has a habit of surfacing months later, when a roofer points at something and asks when it happened.

After a storm passes over you, Forecast Bar writes down what hit. Peak severe probability, peak hail probability, the estimated hail size, whether it went directly overhead or passed nearby, and the window it happened in.

Storm Reports keeps them for two years, which is roughly the timescale on which that roofer turns up. It is reachable from the card itself and from the Weather Alerts screen.

While a storm is still on its way, the Storm Tracker card carries the live version of the same information: probability with a trend arrow, hail size, distance and motion, and either an arrival time or the reassurance that it will pass wide.

A UV index at midnight is not information. Neither is a rain accumulation of zero on a dry week, or a wind gust reading on a still day.

Forecast Bar can now choose its own tiles from what the weather is actually doing. UV while the sun is up, accumulation once it is raining, gusts when it is gusty; fog, heat, chill, mugginess and an approaching sunset all ramp in and out on their own curves. Pick how much you want — Only Important, which can legitimately show nothing on a calm day, Key Basics at about three, or Extended at about six.

It also stops repeating itself. No precipitation chance tile above a rain chart that is already showing you the rain. No Feels Like beside a headline that already says it. Gusts fold into the wind tile, which was showing the range anyway.

The full grid sorts by what matters right now rather than a fixed order. And if you would rather do it yourself, drag a tile — it takes your arrangement and hands control straight back, no setting to find.

Up to five of your saved cities can sit right on the forecast, above or below it, each with its own local time, conditions and temperature. One tap compares, and the arrow beside it switches to that city outright.

Set a Home location and it leads the card whenever you are away from it — so the city you are travelling in is on screen, and the one you left is right underneath it. At home it quietly folds away, because then it is just where you already are.

Compare also stops losing your place: leave it on Current, Hourly or Daily and that is where it opens next time.

The daily forecast table already tells you the highs, the lows and the chance of rain. Repeating those in a paragraph above it would be words for the sake of words.

So the Week Ahead Outlook is written to say only what the table cannot show: the shape of the week. The warming or cooling arc, the front and when it clears, the wet stretch against the dry break, the one day that stands apart from the rest.

One to three sentences, above your daily forecast. It ships switched off — turn it on in Settings › Forecast Bar AI, alongside the rest of Smart Weather Stories.

City packs, photographic scenes and the satellite map are the best-looking backgrounds in the app, and the hardest to read a forecast over.

Two new sliders fix that without throwing the picture away. Blur smooths the detail out while keeping every colour, so a night skyline stays a night skyline. Dimming darkens it for extra contrast. They work independently, they apply to every screen that draws the background, and both start at off — in Settings › Theme & Visual Style.

Knowing that a meteor shower exists is only half the answer. Forecast Bar now tells you whether it is worth going outside where you are.

Meteor showers join eclipses and supermoons, with major showers and predicted outbursts recommended from the start. Tonight's most relevant event can appear directly in the forecast with its best local viewing time.

Open an event for the useful part: the ideal rate beside what you can realistically expect nearby, the best dark window, direction and height in the sky, cloud and rain chances, and practical guidance. Astronomy alerts can also skip events when your local viewing conditions look poor.

A date should not need a different tool depending on which side of today it falls.

Time Machine is one quiet control at the bottom of the forecast. Pick any supported date for the selected place: past dates load historical weather, future dates use the best available outlook, and nearby days sit alongside both in the same presentation. Nothing to configure, save or organise first.

The same date-and-place lookup also powers Weather Photos on iPhone.

Choose an image in Forecast Bar or send one from Photos, and its original date and location recreate the weather around it. Then place, scale and rotate the result directly on the image — restrained type, playful stickers, rain, snow or stars — and share the finished photo.

The photo stays in the editor while Forecast Bar looks up its weather.