Yahoo Weather

It seems like everyone agrees that Yahoo's homepage is a mess, but thankfully the web giant has a better graphic design team for its mobile weather application. Aptly titled Yahoo Weather, the app looks very minimalist and therefore its a joy to use. Yahoo Weather for Android and iOS achieves this look by employing the use of beautiful, high resolution photography, symbols and lightweight fonts to let you find out the weather as quickly as possible.

You can interact with the forecast by scrolling up-and-down the app. When you do so, clever animations kick in. The current day's temperature fades away and the photo in the background blurs. Then a comprehensive five-day forecast emerges. Both screens give you a plethora of information about mother nature's current mood ranging from wind speed to precipitation chances.

Now about those photos, any town or city that has been photographed and posted to photo sharing site Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo!) may pop up on your apps screen depending on your geographic location. For instance, if you're in Chicago while its raining, a shot of a drenched Willis Tower may appear. No other weather app utilizes user-sourced photos of popular attractions and landmarks in such an intelligent manner.

Now what the best part of this app? Well, its accuracy, of course. All of the weather data is updated hourly.

Weather Underground

This app is also available on both Android and iOS platforms. It's touted as "the world's most accurate hyper-local weather forecasts." Weather Underground culls information from over 33,000 personal weather stations. This information is then combined with more traditional weather gathering sources like airports to provide users with a comprehensive data-driven forecast map.

The Weather Underground app is a bit more handy on Android devices though. That's because you don't even need to access the app itself to find out the weather. You can configure the app to push information to your Android phones status bar (i.e. where the battery info and signal strength indicators are located) for quick and easy access. For more detailed information, a widget is also available. But of course opening up the actual application itself is the best way to full plan for the week ahead.

By the way, both of these amazing apps are free.

So what's your favorite way to find out about the weather? Is the morning news your source for all things forecast related? Or perhaps you follow the Weather Channel? Let us know in the comments section below.