We all know that wild weather starts becoming a regular nuisance in May, especially given the state of climate change recently being called the "defining issue of our time" by the UN. So, this week's Tap That App looks at the best weather apps to keep you appraised of what Mother Nature's throwing at you every day.

New and Noteworthy:

Bright Weather

Bright Weather is a new app for Android that makes the weather look good -- even when it's bad. The new app, from the same app studio that gave us Beautiful Widgets, stands out in the crowded field of weather apps because its main screen is packed with basic, useful information, without overwhelming the user. It displays the current temperature, a simple graphic for cloud cover/precipitation conditions, and shows the next 32 hours of the temperature with a flowing line graph.

All of that information, along with any current weather warnings for your area, is displayed in a sparse interface with a Bing image stylishly blurred in the background. A swipe to the right brings up detailed wind conditions and gusts, the "feel like" temperature, a more detailed temperature line graph that shows nightfall and sunrise, and a five-day forecast at the bottom.

One more swipe to the right from the main screen gives you a screen with even more detailed information on current conditions, along with the average and record high/low temperatures for your location, the phase of the moon, and a UV Index rating -- along with the current radar and a picture from 500px.

It sounds like a lot for each screen, but the way it's displayed is tasteful and not clunky. However, there's one strange feature: a camera icon is on the top left of each panel that, when clicked, allows you to take a picture and overlays the forecast on it. It's hard to know how that's useful -- it's clearly meant to try to encourage social media sharing -- but optional temperature alerts, weather service updates, and, of course, the option to make a "beautiful" widget on Android is a plus.

It's free for iOS -- which hasn't been updated and is not nearly as beautiful -- and Android, which has been updated and is. Pay a little more (about $2) and get rid of those ads mucking up your attractive weather app. 

Weather Glance

The new Weather Glance iOS app hit the Apple store early this month, just in time for Apple users needing to know whether the next few days will be bone-chillingly cold, hot and sticky, or cloudy with a few chances of tornadoes. The app has an interface that's similarly beautiful to the Android version of Bright Weather, but it's more geared for iOS, with all the basic weather app features available in a couple taps of the screen.

On the first screen, you get the current temperature, wind conditions, humidity, and a five-day forecast displayed in beautiful iOS 7 pastels color-coded for the temperature, along with a line graph of the probability of precipitation. A deeper look at the "tappable" weather panels gives you detailed hourly forecasts, and you can get a weekly view with multiple cities across the globe as well.

This is more of a daily-use weather app, without too many in-depth features, but the navigability, ease of use, and gorgeous interface make it a recommendation for iOS users. It's also optimized for iPads and iPod Touch's, and for a limited time, it's completely free on the Apple iTunes Store. If you don't catch it now, it'll cost about $2.

Older, but Recommended:

RadarNow!

RadarNow! is anything but a beautiful app, but it's a highly recommended one for weather fanatics and amateur storm chasers. As the name implies, it's all about the radar -- and all about getting that data to you as fast and bare-bones as possible. For Android and iOS, RadarNow! is a freemium app that offers in-app purchases for more types of radar, for the truly weather obsessed.

The basic free app immediately opens on an animated weather radar map, based on your location -- there's none of those pesky current conditions to navigate through. You can zoom in and out either with an overlaid "+/-" symbol or with the intuitive two-finger zoom used by Google Maps. Screen options include controlling the opacity of the radar and map images, showing or hiding county lines, and a tap of the screen hides all options and information, besides a banner ad at the bottom and the radar frame's time.

The radar stations -- RadarNow! proudly uses the National Weather Service's Enhanced Radar Base stations -- are displayed in green on the map, and you can change between them to track a storm, lock one station as the current, or make a favorites list. You can also tap on a location for a small "current conditions" screen, but this is not the focus of the app; tracking storms is.

The premium version -- they offer a free five-day trial before asking you to pony up the $3 it would cost for a one year subscription -- gives you a "full view," which is a composite map made up of all the region's NWS radar put together. It also gives you the option to quickly switch from short range radar to long range, or display composite reflectivity, storm-relative velocity, or base velocity radar views (weather geek essentials). Finally, there's a "Driver" mode that tracks your location constantly and displays the appropriate local radar -- this is a battery-wasting option that's clearly meant for storm chasing with the phone plugged into your car. On top of all that, RadarNow! provides customizable NWS weather alerts for various events in customizable tones or notifications.

All of this is a big processor drain, so we only recommend it for newer, high-powered Android devices or iPhones. But if you want to be on top of the weather before it's on top of you, we recommend RadarNow!