Weather UndergroundReviews 665

Almost none of the longtime users and supporters of Weather Underground can believe how IBM acquired the best weather website in the world and quickly destroyed it. Those of us in tropical regions relied very heavily on this once great service to closely follow developments in the tropics. The tropics blog has been deleted from the site. The weather maps are now well below the standards of local weather broadcasting. How tone deaf is IBM to ignore the almost universal condemnation of what they did to a great non-profit website run by weather experts?

I have been an avid proponent for Weather Underground since 2016, but something has gone very wrong lately. Over the past year my Personal Weather Station now doesnt show up unless you really zoom in, I've re-registered (having a new weather station number) and started again with no improvement. The webcam that I added was difficult to get on-line and now continues to be dropped. People are now calling me saying the camera is not working.
I'm almost embarrassed to have fiends and neighbors log on now. Help is almost no existent and has no confirmation they have done anything. Very frustrating.

Either they are part of the CCP that wants info hidden so it can keep the GW wet dream alive or they are catering to the phone idiots who don't need much because It's easier on phones to load for those with small screens. Most people who use Wunderground just want a basic forecast while they are driving and THAT'S it then they get their Google Maps directions and order their taco ahead oftime on the Taco Bell App.etc. Phone users THINK they have a PC in their pocket but have no idea how much they are being ripped off. It's a dumb PC at best and is a direct slap in the face to actual computer users.

Try to log in and you get a spinning wheel for hours with the eventual message - "server error - please try again later"... when you get that - you can give up trying to get in until the next day...
Half of the cities you search for will not take you to a reporting station in that city - but it dumps you into the nearest airport which could be 100 miles away and 5000 feet difference in elevation...
If you do happen to be able to actually log in - it logs you out within minutes... then when you try to log back in - you get the spinning wheel with the eventual message - "server error - please try again later"... try to drag your favorites to re-order them (as it says you can do) - good luck... thius used to be THE BEST weather site - it didn't go downhill, it dropped off a cliff...

As a software architect, and a weather nerd, it is always a source of great wonder and frustration to experience the Benjamin Button-like lifecycle of the Wunderground app/site. Read your customer comments. You took something so wonderful, and have consistently made it worse (or completely non-functional). The latest iteration... I cannot even load a local forecast from a zip code of city in Chrome or Firefox on any computer for some unknown reason. For the love of God, stop. Do yourselves (and us) a favor, throw out everything you have done in the last 5 years or more, and roll the damn thing back to its glory days.

Hey clueless execs, if we wanted TWC we would've used TWC all these years. People used weather underground strictly to *avoid* TWC and it's low IQ, click-baity, celebrity-focused, overly commercialized "weather" presentations. So what does TWC and IBM do? Obviously buy the competition and make them one and the same.

Gone are the insightful blogs, the interesting user content, basically anything that made WU unique and useful. We do we get instead you may ask? Well, lots of ads, lots of filler in place of scientific content, and overall a generic experience that's virtually indistinguishable from the countless other weather apps out there. It's slower, more bloated, and more buggy than ever before.

IBM and TWC are more interested in tracking and monetizing us, than tracking the weather and informing us. No doubt they derived and will continue to derive great value from all the data they acquired, only we won't benefit from that. The state of WU is proof of that.

Was WU ever the most beautiful or user friendly site? No. But it didn't matter, because there were so many alternatives if you preferred style over substance. Now how many alternatives are there?

You made a beautiful baby, everyone was happy and supportive of this benefit to humanity. Or maybe, you did not make this baby, but are jealous and soulless corporate raider that uses its money and power to tear down all that is good and useful to serve your greed and ignorance. Either return the baby that you are holding hostage to is rightful creators so it can serve humanity as originally intended, or you will continue to expose the fact you are not really in the weather information dissemination business online or on the cable system, but rather another shill to undermine this country and it safety, security and happiness in the relentless pursuit of your race to bottom of worthlessness and vapidity.

Its been five years already I believe since IBM acquired it. Wow - such a bad experience now in 2020. So they own weather.com also - what else I don't know. What I'd like to see is the U.S. government set limits on the extreme number of businesses these few large companies play in. I want someone with a brain in government 20 years later - but I guess that is too much to ask. I want fellow citizens that don't use nasty data-whoring company services - that stop shopping at Amazon and Walmart - and people with the dignity to understand what these nasty companies (like IBM, Google, Amazon) are doing - and they ARE thoroughly screwing up the economy for the average person.

The only reason to use the site is that it shows precipitation as a quantity rather than a probability and a picture to show the volume. Otherwise it's awful. Right as you start to see the trend in the ten-day data it suddenly overlays the data with an ad that you have to mouse to and dismiss. Intensely annoying. It's also really slow because it lays out the page block by block and doesn't know where the information will be until all the ads before it are loaded. And neither do you. You just have to sit and wait. But the app is worse.It's funny, I used to have a good feeling about IBM and now I hate whatever remains of it. And I have no real idea what the company even does anymore. Or even what country is based in. Rumor has it it belongs to the Chinese now.

This used to be my defacto go-to site, and app, for weather information. But ever since it was sold to IBM it has gone downhill. The app is now next to useless, often incorrect and the weather information on the site, which used to be the best and most accurate, is now wrong more often than it's correct.

The app is slow, freezes constantly, and updates are problematic. The widgets for android used to be the best, hands down, now they're all gone except an ugly icon style one.

I've switched to accuweather

When it was run by expert meteorologist founder Jeff Matthews, Weather Underground was the best in the business with a great tropical weather discussion blog. Now that it has been acquired by IBM along with the Weather Channel, it is nothing close to what it once was. The hurricane blog is a dead duck and it is, at best, an average quality weather service. In the prime time hours even during the heighth of the hurricane season, it runs sensational junk commercial and sensational programming. It is like the weather version of USA newspapers lite news. It is all about the lowest common denominator and the almighty dollar.

The site managers at Weather Underground have a bad habit of frequently "redecorating" the site, and each time they do, they lard it with more and more JavaScript. They finally managed to break it sometime in 2017. The scripts run endlessly and my desktop browser times out again and again and again, but the pages never finish loading. The Android mobile application has become similarly useless, so I removed it from my phone six months ago. I've switched to the much simpler, reliable NOAA National Weather Service site for my weather forecasts and current conditions, both on the desktop and on my mobile devices.

Since IBM acquired Weather Underground everything from reliability and support have gone down the tubes. They did away with widgets, data and connection is non-reliable and overall appearance is poor at best. Obviously IBM is too big and has no interest in this and helping users. The IOS app is horrible, and doesn't display Web CAMs anymore. It's a real shame because I have been a big supporter for weather underground for years and have stopped using it. There are now SO many other great weather sites and IOS apps out there.