Sunday, January 20, 2019

Intellicast is dead

Apparently The Weather Channel acquired Intellicast and killed it. intellicast.com now links to Weather Underground, which seems to have the least useful interface of any web site I've ever encountered.

I've managed to find a few pages on the site which display maps and forecasts usefully, largely by Googling since none of their front page links to content actually work.

WU's 10 day graphical forecast looks like Intellicast's, except it's hilariously broken and doesn't show the dates: https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/md/laurel

Alternatives to WU:

NWS 7-day text forecast is presented with enough density to be almost useful, you just have to read the text version. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=39.12&textField2=-76.84

The NWS graphical forecast is great but it's locked into showing only 2 day segments: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=39.12&lon=-76.84&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical

Haven't found a working radar link yet. Here are some second-class radar sites:

This WJLA radar has great detail level but It's very difficult to make it animate and it's filled with spam in ads: https://wjla.com/weather/radar

This NWS radar can be made to animate but it has a tragically limited sight distance: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/radar_lite.php?rid=LWX&product=N0R&loop=yes

This radar maps finally looks like the good national one that Intellicast had. It's as usually very hard to get to through WU's menus. It has a "Play Animation" button that seems to work on the phone but not the desktop, and it has a "Region" button that also doesn't seem to work on desktop: https://www.wunderground.com/maps/radar/current