Weather Wheel

Here is how a weather app normally works. You open it, and it hands you a list. Monday, 71. Tuesday, 68. Wednesday, 70. It is the visual equivalent of a man in a beige suit reading you a spreadsheet, and somewhere around Thursday your eyes wander off to look at something more interesting, such as a moth. Weather Wheel takes the exact same National Weather Service forecast and bends it into a circle. Today sits at the top, where noon lives on a clock. The week runs clockwise. Every slice shows you the sky, the high and the low, the chance of rain and the wind, all at once, in a shape that does not rearrange itself overnight. Wednesday is always in the same place, much like your car keys, except that Wednesday is actually there. WHY A CIRCLE Because a week is a circle. It comes back around. It has been doing this reliably for centuries. Also because the human eye is superb at reading shapes and frankly terrible at reading lists, a fact clock makers have been exploiting for roughly 700 years and weather apps have been exploiting for approximately none. WHAT THE RINGS DO • The outer band is the sky, hour by hour: gold when the sun is out, grey as the clouds gang up, dark blue through the night. A small sun peeks out of the rim where the clouds break, which is the most optimistic thing this app does. • Next in is the weather itself, with the day's high and low curving along the ring so the numbers follow the circle instead of fighting it. The dates curve along the outer edge the same way, and the moon sits out there at every midnight in its actual phase, so you know whether tonight's dog walk is a flashlight walk. • Then the rain ring: a blue line that rises with the chance of precipitation and is filled in underneath, so you can watch a storm arrive the way you watch a wave arrive. A drop, a snowflake or both tells you what is actually going to hit you. • Then the wind ring, which is not a line but a band of colour filling the whole space, glowing from near-black (dead calm) up through blue and teal and gold to red (the afternoon your patio umbrella files for divorce and moves to a neighboring yard). THINGS YOU CAN DO • Tap a day and it steps forward out of the ring, larger, so the day you are actually worried about is the one you can read from across the kitchen. • Tap the rain ring of a day for its hour-by-hour precipitation graph, or the wind ring for the wind: gusts, direction, the lot. The card under the wheel lists sunrise, sunset and the moon while it is at it. • Spin the wheel with your finger. Whatever day you park at the top reads right side up. • Or press SPIN. The wheel goes round five times with the lights going, clicks down like a game show, and picks your day for you. If it picks Monday, that is between you and the wheel. • Tap that day again and the wheel becomes a 24-hour dial of it, noon on top, midnight at the bottom, past hours dimmed, a white hand sitting on the current minute. • Tap the middle for radar: fifty minutes of NOAA NEXRAD, at full resolution, looping smoothly enough that you can watch a squall line make up its mind. • Put the wheel on your Home Screen. The medium and large widgets carry the same week, with sunrise, sunset and tonight's moon along the bottom, and they find your location themselves, with nothing to set up. • Use your location, or search any US city, address or ZIP code and keep a list of saved places. • Fahrenheit or Celsius. Miles per hour or kilometers per hour. We are not here to fight about it. • No account. No third-party ads. No analytics. No tracking. Nothing to buy. We are not monetizing your barometric pressure. The strip at the bottom points at our own apps: nepotism, not advertising. WHERE IT WORKS The forecasts are the genuine National Weather Service products, the same ones your local forecast office issues, which means the United States and its territories. Radar is the US too. If you are somewhere else, we are sorry, and we hear it is lovely there.