If you are used to getting your weather using an app on your smartphone, you need to be aware that apps are not the best source of weather information when we are in a rapidly changing weather event. That could be during a tornado or hurricane or even in a fast-moving cold front like today, where weather conditions can change rapidly over just a few hours. Most weather apps are only updated once or twice a day and the little icons they show just picture a general weather pattern over the day, but don’t give a full scope of how the weather is going to change. For example, today many people may have reached their high temperature for the day early this morning before the cold front passed, and the temperatures will be dropping all day. So if you are planning for an afternoon high that matches what your app says, you are going to be cold and might complain that your local meteorologist or NWS forecast “got it wrong again”.
Apps are great for when you need general guidance about the weather conditions for the day, but are not good if you need detailed hour by hour information. There are also specialized apps for irrigation scheduling and other agricultural planning. For severe weather, there are a number of apps that are designed specifically to give you local information that includes tornado warnings, and others that give up to day radar information. You can read more about the problems with weather apps at Forbes.com from Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA here.
