Are you worried about global warming? Or are you looking for weather forecasts at your fingers? Here in London, we’ve seen extremely unusual weather patterns in the past decade.
What’s the difference between climate change and weather. Weather refers to short term atmospheric (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Climate is the weather of a specific region averaged over a long period of time.
Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure. In most places, weather changes from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season.
Are you looking to stream your weather data to a personal web site? We highly recommend you combine WeeWX with a small single-board computer, such as one from the very inexpensive Raspberry Pi range. A very cheap but reliable solution.
Many of the software tools retrieve their weather data from the OpenWeatherMap no charge weather API. This lets you access current weather data for any location including over 200,000 cities.
If you love the power of the command-line, you’ll want terminal-based weather tools. You should read our separate roundup.
Here’s our verdict captured in a ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.
The table below lets you explore each of the tools. Click the links in the table to learn about each tool, with detailed features, screenshots, and more.
| GUI Weather Software | |
|---|---|
| WeeWX | Interacts with weather stations to produce graphs/reports |
| OpenWeather Refined | GNOME shell extension which displays weather information |
| Mousam | Weather at a glance |
| GTK Meteo | Weather forecast application |
| meteo-qt | System tray application for weather status information |
| Typhoon | Provides real-time weather updates and forecasts |
| Condensed Weather | KDE Plasma widget |
| Weather | Monitor the current weather conditions |
| Halo | Weather software written in Python |
| wmweather+ | National Weather Service METAR bulletins, ANV and MRF forecasts |
| Kweather | Convergent weather application for Plasma |
| Nimbus | Minimal weather applet |
This article has been revamped in line with our recent announcement.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
This roundup has been revamped, removing the terminal-based tools to a separate article, and updating. Hence why there are comments older than the published date.
Hi Steve. I love running ‘curl wttr.in’ in the terminal. You can also use ‘curl wttr.in/YOURCITY’. ?
Luke covered that in https://www.linuxlinks.com/wego-ascii-weather-app-for-the-terminal/
Yes, it’s always worth reading the linked entries, such as Wego, before commenting 🙂
True.
Ah ok, thanks.