You can never be sure about the weather, unless it’s happening. Fortunately, today’s forecasts are pretty reliable. And while weather reports are all over the place, if you don’t consistently listen to the radio or watch TV forecasts, a browser plugin might be a convenient solution.

Weather Watcher Live is a Chrome extension powered by WeatherBug that puts a weather forecasts directly into your browser toolbar. You can select from hundreds of weather stations worldwide. While the toolbar icon displays a visual summary of your active weather station, the pop-up window that opens when you left-click the icon contains detailed weather data, including current conditions, daily forecasts, latest radar images, and weather alerts. Neat extension if you have to rely on weather forecasts.

Installing Weather Watcher Live

After installing Weather Watcher Live from the Chrome Web Store, a new icon will appear in Chrome’s top right, next to your other installed extensions. Since you yet have to set it up, it won’t do anything when you left-click it.

For setup, right-click the icon and select Options to open the Weather Watcher Live options window in a new tab. The key settings are found under the tabs Stations and Conversion.

Adding Weather Stations

First, add some weather stations. Go to the Stations tab, click the Add Station… button, enter a location, then pick an available weather station from the list below the map. The map helps you determine which station is closest to you. When you’re happy with your selection, click OK and the respective station will appear in your list. You can add as many stations as you like. However, only the currently selected station will be active!

To edit the displayed name of a station click the Edit Station… button. To remove a weather station, select it from the list and click the respective button.

Changing Conversions

Per default, Weather Watcher Live uses Fahrenheit, mph, and inches, i.e. the non-metric system. If you would like to see your temperature in Celsius and get wind speed, pressure, and precipitation in metric units, switch to the Conversion tab and select your preferred units.

Now that you have completed the most important steps to setting up the extension, let’s see what else it can do.

Toolbar Settings

The toolbar icon is what you will be looking at most of the time, so it better be nice. You can select from different icon styles and you can choose what information the icon label text will display. To do so, go to the Toolbar Icon tab and make your selection.

Under Toolbar Tooltip you can choose what data should be listed in the tooltip, i.e. the little box that appears when you hover over the icon with your mouse without clicking it.

Another important item is the pop-up window, which comes up when you left-click the icon. As mentioned previously, this is empty when you first install the extension. Now that you have added some weather stations, however, it will actually display weather information.

When you left-click the toolbar icon after adding stations, you will see weather data for your active weather station. You can switch between two views: NOW (screenshot below) and DAILY, which shows a 7 days forecast and more data points. Click UPDATE to get the latest forecast and to change your settings, click the OPTIONS button.

Clicking any other link will open a detailed forecast from the respective weather station in a new tab. You can choose weather those links should open in the background or focused under General in the Weather Watcher Live options.

Alerts

This extension can alert you of extreme weather conditions. A list of available Alerts can be found under the respective tab in the options window. Several alerts are pre-selected, but you can change those as you please and choose an alert sound.

Conclusion

Weather Watcher Live is a nice browser extension for people who can’t get their weather forecasts through alternative channels, like the radio, TV, or a local window.

If you are looking for other alternatives to receive weather forecasts, we have previously reviewed the following

• Currently: Replace New Browser Tab With Weather & Current Time [Chrome]
• ForecastFox Is An Awesome Extension For Getting Weather Forecasts [Chrome]
• AccuWeather Is The Perfect Weather App You Were Always Looking For [Android & iOS]
• WeatherBug – Even Better Than The Weather Channel [Android]
• Predict The Future (Of Weather) With These 7 Awesome Weather Apps [Android]
• Enjoy The Weather Every Day With These 4 Beautiful Weather Apps [iOS]
• Forecaster – A Portable App That Will Place The Weather At Your Fingertips [Windows]
• sWeather – The Best Portable Weather Tracker In Your System Tray [Windows]

How do you stay informed about the weather?