I’m trying to plan a trip and am wondering if Apple Weather on my iPhone can help me identify temperature and humidity in various cities along with general trends?
Without much fanfare, Apple has been making the Weather app, a mainstay of all its devices since before the release of the very first iPhone, a remarkably powerful and sophisticated program. You can track the weather in dozens of cities, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, and much, much more. It’s pretty interesting, actually, because a distance of just a few hundred miles can produce dramatically different weather (and sometimes a dozen miles is sufficient to have completely different weather too).
There’s also a very attractive summary view if you are tracking a lot of different cities in your Weather app, which I explore in great detail in this tutorial: How to Add Cities to the iPhone Weather App. Turns out that you can still explore weather in other locations by simply going to the “add a city” screen and searching for the city without actually “adding” it, meaning you can obtain an instant forecast and report for anywhere!
THE WEATHER IN LONGMONT, COLORADO
I’ll start out by opening up the official Apple Weather app on my iPhone while I’m visiting Cavegirl Coffee, a favorite coffee shop in Longmont, Colorado. The display is probably familiar to most every iPhone owner:
Turns out it’s a very pleasant late summer afternoon, relatively mild with a 50% chance of rain and a current high of 86ºF. Swipe up to move down and there’s a lot more information available:
I’m always intrigued by the “Feels Like” information, because it actually factors in multiple weather characteristics, including humidity and wind speed. In this instance, it’s indicating that it feels cooler than the actual temperature due to a cool breeze. There are also some weather paradoxes shown here too! For example, how do we have a 50% chance of rain but no precipitation expected in the next ten days? Anyway!
Notice that the current humidity here in dry Colorado is 29%. Turns out you can tap on any of these info panes and get more information, so I’m going to tap on “Humidity” to learn more…
Colorado is rather famous for its low humidity, muchly due to altitude: Longmont is 4984′ above sea level.
To notice here is the tiny three-wavy-lines-with-rainddrop icon with its adjacent “v” symbol. That’s a menu! Tap on it and you’ll find that there’s a lot of information you can view about a location:
For example, let’s see how the UV Index relates to time of day:
No huge surprise; it’s at zero when it’s dark and gradually increases until the sun is directly overhead, then diminishes until sunset.
What about some other cities?
INVESTIGATING OTHER CITIES IN WEATHER
I’ve been cropping the images above to save space, but every screen has a small toolbar along the bottom just like this from the main Longmont weather view:
It’s typically Apple subtle, but this offers the ability to switch map views and denotes that I have four other cities in my weather list I can view by swiping left or right. It also shows the three dot-line icon, which is what we want. Tap on it and you’ll be able to see what cities you have on your own list and add new ones!
Since Kansas City is one of the places I track it’s easy to get more detailed information with a tap, but notice on the top the “Search for a city or airport”: You can type in any city around the world, and with a single tap be viewing its weather, whether it’s São Paolo, Brazil, Lagos, Nigeria, or Shenzen, China.
Let’s look at the humidity in two US cities: Lake Charles, Louisiana, and Las Vegas, Nevada, generally known as having the highest and lowest humidity figures in the nation. This is done by entering “Lake Charles” into the search box and tapping on the resultant humidity figure. This is best done in the “Feels Like” info, which is pretty daunting!
Notice here that there’s so much humidity – 55% – that their air temperature of 98ºF actually feels like 110ºF. That’s hot, no way around it, and it’s not going to cool off much tonight either, as the graph shows. Even at midnight it’s still going to feel like it’s in the low 90’s.
Las Vegas has very low humidity, by contrast, but it’s also hot there:
Because the humidity is so low – 20% – it actually feels cooler than the air temperature, 94ºF versus 96ºF. Not a big difference, but better than 110ºF in Louisiana, right?
Suffice it to say that there is quite a bit of weather-related information you can access from the iPhone Weather app if you poke around and explore. It can be fascinating and, sometimes, it can make you very glad you’re were you are, not somewhere else! Then again, Malibu Beach in Southern California is 74ºF with gentle wind gusts, which sounds pretty darn nice even when compared to Longmont, Colorado… 🤓
Pro Tip: I’ve written quite a bit about the Apple iPhone and iOS both. Please check out my extensive iPhone & iOS Help Library for lots of additional details.