The top 5 extreme weather radar apps you need to download today

The weather can be unpredictable and occasionally deadly. If you live in an area that’s prone to flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, or severe thunderstorms, install a weather radar app on your awesome Android Phone that will let you know when and where your local area will get hit.

While there are plenty of great weather apps on Android that don’t necessarily provide a good weather radar, it’s worth looking at these five apps for their ability to map out everything in the sky that might rain down on you or blow you away.

1. The Weather Channel

It’s no surprise that the nation’s most-trusted source of the weather also has a great weather app. For an app with such a broad focus, it has a surprisingly robust radar feature.

Unlike most weather apps, which get their information directly from NOAA, The Weather Channel’s app uses data provided by IBM’s proprietary weather technology. This data includes an impressive predictive algorithm, showing a fairly-accurate projection of where storms, rainfall, snowfall, and hurricanes will head in the future. However, it takes a premium subscription to unlock this feature’s full potential.

For those less interested in the future and more interested in the nitty-gritty of the present, the app’s radar features some nifty map layers such as UV Index, “feels like” temperature, and dew point. This app also has hourly forecasts, hyper-local weather alerts, and weather-related videos all rolled into one.

2. WeatherBug

If you’ve been around tech for a long time, you might associate the name “WeatherBug” with the invasive desktop app that bordered on malware. However, the company has shed its shady past and offers some impressive weather analytics, thanks in no small part to its network of weather stations located at schools across the world.

WeatherBug brings the full power of these stations onto its weather map. It provides the standard radar coverage and also some absurdly detailed local data, such as the exact temperature and air pressure at each of the hundreds of stations it has installed.

3. Flowx

Many weather apps try to do everything at once. Flowx takes a different approach. It puts all its effort into simulating the weather for the upcoming week. You’ll notice this hyper-focus the moment you drag your finger around the screen and realize that you’re not moving the map around. Instead, you’re moving time around.

Using three predictive models (four, if you have an annual subscription), you can see what the weather map will probably look like over the course of the next week.

While Flowx isn’t exactly a radar map, it provides an exciting functionality with a similar-enough purpose to warrant a place on this list.

4. MyRadar

MyRadar’s features are pretty standard, showing an animation of the cloud cover and precipitation over the past few hours. The interface can be a bit clunky, but it has nifty features that map power outages, wildfires, air quality, and even satellites in orbit. It also provides fairly accurate alerts about when and where it will start raining.

The app’s most notable feature is the ability to put a radar widget on your homescreen. It’s not perfect. The widget’s radar is notably low-resolution, for one thing. Still, no other weather apps have a comparable feature.

If you want to see the weather radar when you open your phone, MyRadar is the only option available.

5. Clime

It was tempting to avoid adding this app to the list, despite its popularity and its plethora of features. The reason for this is simple. The sheer number of ads that this app subjects you to is ridiculous, and the app is extremely aggressive in trying to get you to sign up for its paid version.

However, the app does a great job of customizing its experience to its users, and its map gives you a comprehensive view of the radar and the local weather without having to fiddle with the layers and settings. It would have been much better if it did all that without pushing an ad almost every time the app switches screens.

In case of an emergency

A good radar app can help you avoid an emergency situation, but it can’t guarantee that you will always be safe. To prepare for when the worst happens, take a look at our guide on how to set up emergency SOS features on Android.