“Looks like good weather this week”, said an unwitting friend to me on Monday. “Yes, highs of 28 degrees celsius on Monday with a very low chance of precipitation”, I replied. She looked at me blankly, not realising that over lockdown I have become a weather-watching obsessive.
I promise I wasn’t always like this. Pre-Covid, my meteorological interest extended to checking the forecast on a grey day to see if I needed an umbrella. That was it.
But from March it all changed. The start of lockdown was so bleak, so monotonous – a constant wheel of work, exercise, eat, sleep and fret – that I found myself checking my phone’s weather app nearly every hour. By knowing whether there was sun or rain, I could mark one day from the next. A small victory in a sea of sameness.
Soon, my furtive glances at my phone’s weather app had taken on the thrill of gambling: would I be hanging out my washing today, or reaching for my umbrella to take my lockdown-permitted stroll? This is what happens to my brain after three months without social contact. It melts.
I don’t think I’m alone in my weather app addiction. People around me report the same experience: like me, they’ve tried multiple apps and, like me, they’ve found themselves checking them more often, even looking at the weather in places where they are not.
Why? Surely one answer is that we’re just more connected to the weather this year, because we’re closer to it. For years, a large slice of the country has worked in large offices, where we’re often sat so far from a window that we wouldn’t know if there had been a thunderstorm. For the first time in years, I’m now spending my working hours outside – at a desk in my garden. I watch the sun rise, I watch the sun set. All on my weather app, of course.
Here’s what I’ve learned as a seasoned weather app watcher…
Ditch the free weather apps…
The Apple Weather app is only ever ballpark correct. It can tell you if there is a rainy day coming up this week, but it has a lot of trouble working out which day that will be.
The inaccuracy of the app actually caused me quite a bit of heartache in lockdown. When we were allowed to meet up one-on-one outside, my boyfriend and I went to a park for a socially-distanced picnic on a day when Apple Weather promised beaming sunshine.
About half an hour in, a harsh wind came out of nowhere. One moment, my boyfriend was holding a paper plate with cake and custard. The next, the wind picked it up and slapped it onto his face like a clown getting hit with a cream pie. He peeled the plate off his face and found his fringe glued to his forehead and smelling like vanilla. I refreshed the Apple Weather app, which told me that we were currently experiencing fine weather and temperatures in the mid 20s.
That moment was honestly very funny – but the rest of the day was just a bit sad, sitting under a dark sky when we’d been promised sun, not being allowed to kiss.
There are two morals to that story. Firstly, don’t eat custard in a storm. And secondly, look beyond the free weather apps that come with your phone.
… And find a better one
After my trials with Apple Weather I switched to using the BBC Weather app, which seemed to be far more accurate in my area. It has other delightful bells and whistles, like being able to pick out a pretty detailed location for you via GPS.
If you have £3.99 and several hours to waste, download Dark Sky, which can give you a forecast detailed enough to pick out your street. But honestly, be careful with it, as it is easy to lose a lot of time watching how a rain cloud favours one side of town to another.
(Side note: Dark Sky was bought in March by Apple, so you can’t download it onto an Android device. Sorry, weather watchers.)
— to www.telegraph.co.uk
