MeteoSwiss

Review by eFreeware

If you live in Switzerland, work outdoors there, or spend time in the Alps, MeteoSwiss is the kind of app that earns a permanent spot on your home screen. It comes from the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, so the forecasts, measurements and hazard warnings are national data. The app has been installed more than a million times and holds a 4.3 average from roughly 39,500 ratings, which suggests it does the basics well enough to keep people coming back.

What you get is a single place for local forecasts, live station readings and official warnings about natural hazards. The developer leads with the warning system, and that is where the app differs from a general weather service: you can follow storms, floods, forest fires, earthquakes and avalanches as the federal authorities publish them. For anyone who plans around Swiss weather rather than just checking a temperature, that combination is the main draw.

Warnings you configure to your own thresholds

The warning side of the app is built around subscriptions. You pick the locations you care about, choose which warning types matter to you, and set the thresholds at which you want to be notified. Those alerts arrive as push notifications. It is billed as a personalised system, and the threshold setting is the part that makes that plausible: a hiker and a farmer may want very different triggers for the same region.

Coverage spans severe weather, floods, forest fire, earthquakes and avalanches, all sourced from the federal authorities. There is also an interactive map showing warning areas and a national natural hazard bulletin for the wider picture. I would expect the map view to be the quicker option when a warning lands and you want to know whether it covers your valley or the next one over.

The value here depends on how much you tune it. A default setup will tell you a lot; narrowing it to your home, your workplace and the routes you travel regularly is what turns a general feed into something you act on. The effort you put into that list is what you get back.

Forecasts, measurements and maps in one place

Forecasts start with an on-site view giving a five-hour outlook for wherever you are, then widen out to local forecasts for any place or ZIP code in Switzerland with an eight-day overview. There are also wind and temperature readings at different altitudes, which matters more than usual in a country where the weather at 1,500 meters can be nothing like the weather in the valley below.

Beyond the local picture, the app also covers each of Switzerland's language regions, offers an outlook for the coming week, and includes a European isobar map plus a road condition forecast. That last one is the sort of detail that makes a difference on a winter morning before you commit to a mountain pass.

The animation layer covers precipitation, precipitation type, wind, temperature, hail and clouds, alongside satellite imagery. There is a hail reporting function for flagging what you are seeing, and the app displays reports and images submitted by other users for specific weather events. Measurement data comes from a network of weather stations shown on an interactive map or as a list, with some values refreshing as often as every ten minutes.

Pollen, UV, air quality and snow

Under sports and health, the app gathers air quality, pollen forecasts, the UV index, and snow depth with fresh snow forecasts. For anyone with seasonal allergies or a habit of checking the UV before a long day outside, these sit naturally next to the forecast rather than requiring a separate app. Skiers and mountaineers get the snow figures in the same place as the avalanche warnings, which is a sensible pairing.

There is also a blog with daily posts on weather and climate topics. It is the part of the app that explains what is happening rather than just reporting numbers, and it gives the whole thing a bit more depth than a straightforward forecast tool.

Recent updates have added home screen widgets for the blog and the weather report, extended the precipitation probability maps so you can display the likelihood of different precipitation amounts, and added more measurement values to the map. If you already use the app, those are the changes worth noticing; if you are new, they simply mean the map and widget side is more developed than it once was.

What it asks of you

MeteoSwiss is free to download. It does offer in-app purchases, and one of them covers aviation weather: METAR and TAF for Switzerland, aviation warnings, wind animations at different flight levels, GAFOR, text forecasts for powered flight, gliding and ballooning, low-level significant weather charts for the Alps and Europe, pressure difference, QNH and W/T charts, wind barbs, regtherm, trajectories and emagrams. If you fly, that bundle is the reason to look at this app rather than a general forecast service.

The other requirement is geographic. The app is built around Switzerland: forecasts are offered for Swiss places and ZIP codes, the warnings come from Swiss federal authorities, and the regional weather reports cover the country's three language regions. It is a national service doing a national job, and its usefulness tracks how much of your life happens inside those borders.

There is a practical demand on you as well. The warning system only becomes personal once you have added your locations and chosen warning types and thresholds, and the app is organized around keeping a clean list of the places that matter to you. Set that up early and the rest of the app follows from it; leave it empty and you are looking at a very good general forecast without the tailored alerts.

How I would use it day to day

I would start by adding three or four locations: home, work, and any route or destination you return to often. Then go into the warning settings and decide what actually warrants a notification. A threshold that fires too easily gets ignored within a week, so it is worth being selective about which hazard types you subscribe to and at what level.

For everyday planning, the five-hour on-site forecast plus the eight-day local view covers most decisions. When something bigger is brewing, the warning map and the national bulletin give the context that a single location cannot. The animation layers are the tool I would reach for when the question is when rather than whether: watching precipitation or cloud move across the map tells you more about timing than a percentage does.

The pollen, UV and air quality panels fit a different rhythm. They are the kind of thing you check on the days they matter, not every morning, and having them alongside the forecast saves a separate lookup. The blog is worth a look when a spell of weather is unusual enough that you want to understand it, and the new widgets put the weather report or the latest post on your home screen without opening anything.

A national service that rewards a little setup

MeteoSwiss is a focused app rather than a broad one, and that focus is its strength. The forecasts, measurements, hazard warnings and health-related data all come from the same national source, presented in one place. The 4.3 average across tens of thousands of ratings reflects an app that has been doing this since 2013 and is still being updated, with the latest release bringing widget support and expanded precipitation probability maps.

It suits people whose weather questions are Swiss ones: residents, commuters crossing a pass, hikers and skiers, growers, and anyone who wants official warnings rather than a generic forecast. Pilots have a clear reason to consider the aviation purchase, which bundles the specialized charts and forecasts that general users will never need.

The app concentrates on Swiss weather, so it suits anyone who wants detailed forecasts for that country. For Switzerland, though, it is the version of the weather app that comes with the authorities attached, and the effort of configuring your locations and warning thresholds is repaid the first time a notification arrives before the storm does.

What's new in version 3.6.0

With the latest release of the MeteoSwiss app, we have enhanced the precipitation probability maps to include the option to display the probability of different amounts of precipitation. In addition, the new ‘Blog’ and ‘Weather Report’ widgets can be added to the home screen. As regards measurement data, additional values can now be displayed on the map.