Windy: The Best Free Weather App on the Market?

Windy (formerly known as Windyty) is an extraordinary tool for weather forecast visualization. It’s fast, intuitive and detailed, and it’s considered one of the most accurate weather apps out there. It’s free for both iOS and Android.

Windy is used by professional pilots, paragliders, skydivers, kiters, surfers, boaters, fishermen, storm chasers, weather geeks, and even governments, army staffs and rescue teams. The beauty of Windy lies in the fact that it brings you better quality information than the pro features of other apps do for free, and without ads. It can be translated into 40 world languages. As written in the App Store, Windy brings you all the world’s leading weather forecasting models: global ECMWF and GFS, plus local NEMS and ICON (for Europe) and NAM (for the USA). In other words, it’s about as comprehensive as weather forecasting gets.

Windy’s beautiful interface lets you toggle on/off 35 different weather layers, including those of wind, rain, temperature, humidity, and more, including CAPE index. You can add your favorite weather layers to the menu, customize the color palette on any weather layer, access advanced options in the settings, and save your preferences. You can even choose to display airports around the world, 1,500+ paragliding spots, kiting spots, and nearby webcams. Here’s more, from the App Store description:

Detailed forecast
For any location on the map you can display the following detailed weather information:

• Basic forecast – temperature, rain and snow accumulation, wind speed, wind gusts and wind direction
• Meteogram – temperature and dew point, wind speed and wind gusts, pressure, precipitation, altitude cloud cover, cloud base
• Airgram – wind barbs, temperature and cloud cover in different altitudes, precipitation)
• Waves forecast – wind direction, wind speed and wind gusts, wave direction, and wave height, swell direction and swell height, swell period

Email alerts
For any place on Earth, you can set an alert for your “desired weather.” These alerts consider a number of weather conditions: wind, waves, rain, new snow, temperature, clouds, time/duration, and forecast model settings.

Weather radar
Available for the USA (including Hawaii and coastal parts of Alaska), South Korea, and a couple of islands in the North Pacific Ocean and in the Caribbean. Updated every five minutes.