What is the Weather?

It’s getting to feel like springtime, so I’m thinking of taking a couple of days off to nip up to the Lake District for a long weekend. But I don’t want to go if it will be cold and miserable. (If that’s the case, I’ll curl up at home with a good book.) So should I go? And if so, should I take off the Thursday and Friday, or the Monday and Tuesday? Bing can help.

Searching for “Weather in Windermere” gives me a five-day forecast right at the top of the page:

 

Looks like the weather will be pretty good most of the week. A little on the chilly side, but at the moment there is only a very slight wind and fairly low humidity, so the cold shouldn’t be penetrating. I see that both Foreca and Intellicast are giving similar temperature estimates, which makes me pretty sure that the forecast is fairly accurate (well, as sure as one can be in Britain!). But Friday doesn’t look too promising. I want to know if things will get better after that. So I click on “Compare 10 Day Forecast”

 

 Not looking so good from either provider. I think I should do some reading this weekend and postpone my trip for a week or two. Are things likely to get better in a few weeks? I click on the Weather Overview link on the left side of the page (or on the title link of the original five-day forecast), and I get a page that contains (among lots of other useful data) this:

 

Looks like we’re moving into the driest and warmest part of the year. There should be a good weekend to head to Windermere in the next month or two.

Now, back to work: I need to call someone at an office in Dublin, and I want to make some small talk at the beginning of the call. What better small talk than the weather? I get the same sort of five-day forecast at the top of the page that I got for Windermere, but in this case, I want to talk about the weather now, so I click on the Hourly Forecast link. This time, I get a page with lots of neat information. I see not only what the weather will be like for the rest of the day (at the top of the page) but also a weather map of the surrounding region, which I can use to display temperature, satellite images, or cloud cover; and hourly forecasts for Dublin for the next few days. Plenty of material for a bit of small talk.

 

 

 

 

 All this will enable you to spend more time outside enjoying the weather, rather than inside searching endlessly for forecasts or finding yourself caught outside in a downpour.

 –Marcus Duyzend, Developer