I am looking for an app that will look every hour at 15 day weather forecast for a zip code. As soon as any day in the future 15 days is predicted to have a low temperature of 40F or lower, it would alert me by a text message. It will not send me any daily messages or anything else spammy.
A paid app is okay.
Good luck!
Is it even possible to get an accurate prediction of the weather 15 days from now by looking manually at weather sites?
Not really. Most weather apps (and even the National Weather Service) only have forecasts going out for no more than about 14 days, and once you get past about 3 to 5 days in the future, forecasts aren’t particularly reliable.
The mathematical models which are used for weather forecasting have become a lot better in the past few decades, and near-term forecasts (again, for the upcoming few days) are usually quite accurate. But, the error range on weather forecasts increases dramatically as one attempts to forecast further out into the future, and the forecast for 15 days in the future is subject to much revision as that date grows closer, due to changing weather patterns in the intervening days.
If a weather forecast tells me that, two days from now, the temperature will drop below 40F, I can usually be pretty sure that that’ll be close to the truth. But, at two weeks’ distance, even if the forecast says it’ll be below 40F, the actual weather on that date has a pretty strong probability of being significantly different from that, when the time finally comes.
As this page on the web site for NOAA (the parent agency of the U.S.'s National Weather Service) notes:
Also, in looking at several of my weather apps, below is how many days out they publish weather forecasts:
The forecast pages from the National Weather Service (weather.gov) go out to 7 days in the future.
I do not care about accuracy. Just want an alert if it is predicted even inaccurately.
14 days is fine too. Again, I do not care if the prediction is reliable or not.
Fair enough. Unfortunately, I’m unaware of the ability to set up the kind of custom alert/alarm that you’re hoping for, with any of the major weather apps.
My apps can be set up to send me push notifications when the NWS issues a weather advisory for a particular location (e.g., tornado watch, freeze warning, etc.), but those are typically issued no more than 12 hours or so ahead of the anticipated weather, which is, obviously, far less that what you are hoping for. And, all they are doing is notifying me of a NWS advisory having been issued; those notifications aren’t being triggered by any piece of data being generated by the app or its forecasts.
The app on my phone has 28 day temperature and rain forecasts for all Australian places but, as posters have said, only 14 day forecasts for overseas cities.
Sounds like a job for a simple web scraper.
Yeah, I could write a web app for you to get an email or somesuch when NOAA says you’re forecast to drop below 40F within the next week (that’s about all they predict with that resolution). I don’t want to write it, but you could do it yourself or find someone else to do it. You could probably get it done for fairly cheap if you just wanted a basic notification. But as has been mentioned, if you’re really wanting 15 days notice, you’re going to get a lot of false positives and false negatives from the service you use.
Heck, even NOAA has spotty accuracy past 5 days on its good weeks.
It’s made up after 7 days.
