Your local forecast, back on the air.

A loop, not a screen

Current conditions, your local forecast, the hourly, local radar, the extended outlook, the almanac, the tides and this date in history play in order, two to three minutes a cycle, then start over, the way a cable feed does. Inland, the tide segment drops itself; on a date the corpus has nothing for, so does the history. There is nothing you have to do. Leave it on while you make coffee and it will still be going when you get back.

The voice

Segments are announced aloud with on-device speech (“And now, your extended forecast”), phrased the way a forecast was read on air, and your music ducks underneath. Turn the voice off and the loop keeps running silently. Turn it on and you can stop looking at the television, which is rather the point.

Tiered alerts

Tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings stop the loop: attention tone, full-screen red page, read aloud, then back to the forecast. Every other watch and advisory turns the lower display line red and crawls the actual hazard text there instead, with no tone and no interruption. Press down and the crawl steps aside for ten minutes, leaving a small yellow chip in its place. A given alert takes the screen once and once only.

Apple Weather

Conditions, the forecast and the almanac come through WeatherKit. Attribution lives in Settings → Acknowledgments, and it follows the data rather than the setting: put your own station in the base and the Apple mark steps aside for a WeatherFlow credit, because Apple’s mark over somebody else’s numbers would be misattribution.

National Weather Service

Watches, warnings and advisories come from api.weather.gov, polled politely: never faster than every two minutes, with a descriptive user agent identifying the app.

NOAA radar

Animated base reflectivity from the NOAA map services, drawn natively over a US Census basemap bundled with the app.

NOAA tides

Tide predictions come from CO-OPS for the nearest station, with an override picker when the nearest one is not the one you mean. Most US stations are subordinate and publish only the day’s highs and lows, so the curve drawn between them is synthesized. Inland, the segment removes itself from the lineup.

NOAA climate records

Record high and low for today and tomorrow come from the ACIS climate service, taken from a station with at least thirty years of record and refreshed once a calendar day.

Your own station, optionally

Point it at a WeatherFlow Tempest in your yard and its readings can overlay the forecast, or become the forecast base outright.

United States, mostly

Right now the app is limited to the US App Store. Alerts, radar, tides and climate records are all US government services, so outside the country the loop would run on WeatherKit conditions, forecast and almanac alone, without the interrupts, the radar, the tides or the records.

Not a life-safety device

Composite Sky is a display. In severe weather, follow your local emergency management, a NOAA weather radio, and your own good sense, not a television app.

Now: beta 1

The full eight-segment loop, animated radar, spoken intros, tiered alerts with a dismissible crawl, tides, climate records, lightning counts, an optional Tempest station, cached fallback and the standby card.

Next

A station-only segment (lightning, rain today, gusts, solar) for the people running their own hardware. Then saved locations with a rotation between them, and travel cities.

Later

A selectable announcer voice, screen-saver mode, and a marine and aviation segment for the people who ask for it.