The Clever Korner
The weather korner

Watch the sky yourself.

Nearly every weather app is a wrapper around free government data, sold back to you with advertising. These are the sources themselves — all free, none requiring an account. Start with the live map.

Live radar and surface conditions. Drag, zoom, and switch layers.Open Zoom Earth satellite view →
The sources, direct

Eight free tools, no account on any of them

Zoom Earth →

Live satellite imagery, storm tracks, hurricanes, wildfires and rain radar on one map, with no account and no app.

The fastest way to see what is actually happening overhead right now rather than what a forecast model thinks will happen. Scrub the timeline backward and you can watch a front arrive.

NWS / weather.gov →

The United States National Weather Service. Forecasts, watches, warnings, and the forecast discussion.

Read the Area Forecast Discussion — the plain-English note where the local forecaster explains what they are unsure about. It is the single most undervalued free weather product in the country.

NWS radar →

The raw national radar mosaic, straight from the source with no app between you and it.

Every weather app you have ever used is a skin over this data. Going direct is faster and never shows you an ad.

Windy →

Model-driven wind, rain, temperature and pressure layers you can scrub through time.

Best tool here for 'will I get a frost Thursday' and for seeing which direction a system is really tracking.

Drought Monitor →

Weekly national drought classification, county by county.

If you are planning tank capacity or deciding whether to run the well hard this summer, this is the map that should inform it.

NOAA Climate Normals →

Thirty-year averages for your own station: frost dates, rainfall by month, temperature extremes.

This is where a real planting calendar comes from. Not a zone map — your station, your numbers, thirty years deep.

Blitzortung lightning map →

A live, volunteer-operated lightning strike network covering most of the world.

It is the community version of the $25 lightning detector in the index — same idea, somebody else's sensors.

GOES satellite, full resolution →

Direct NOAA geostationary satellite imagery, updated every few minutes.

When you want to see the cloud structure itself rather than somebody's rendering of it.
The honest part

Every link on this page needs the internet.

That is worth saying plainly on a site about self-reliance. The map above goes blank the moment your connection does, and connections go down most reliably during exactly the weather you most wanted to watch.

So the weather tools that matter most are the ones sitting on your own property:

  • Your own weather station ($80–200) logging to a box in your house. After two seasons you have something no forecast can give you: the actual frost dates, rainfall and wind on your ground, which differs from the airport reading more than most people expect.
  • A barometer. A falling needle has predicted weather reliably for three hundred years and will keep doing it through any outage. A pressure sensor on your own network does the same thing and can wake you up.
  • A lightning detector — $25, works with everything down, and often warns you minutes before a radar app does.
  • A NOAA weather radio. Battery powered, broadcast over the air, independent of the internet entirely. The least glamorous item on this page and the one most likely to matter.
  • Printed climate normals for your station. Pull them once, print them, put them on the shelf. A thirty-year average does not need to be live.
The weather chapter is in the guideBack to the index