The Weather Underground Alternative Built for Forecast Creators

Weather Underground used to be the best place on the internet for serious weather enthusiasts.

Founded in 1995 by University of Michigan students, it became the community hub for amateur meteorologists, personal weather station owners, storm chasers, and anyone who wanted weather data that went deeper than a seven-day consumer app. At its peak, WU had 250,000+ personal weather stations contributing observations, 47 million monthly visitors, and a genuine community of people who cared about weather at a level that the Weather Channel never served.

Then IBM acquired it. Then Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, bought it in February 2024.

By June 2025, Weather Underground had removed hourly, daily, and weekly forecasts entirely. It now shows current conditions. The webcam network was shut down. Customer service went dark. Station call signs changed without notification. Temperature data that had documented 11°F errors went unfixed.

The community Weather Underground built is homeless.

What WU killed — and why it mattered

Weather Underground's community was doing something specific that the mainstream weather apps never understood: it was a place where forecasters and observers could share their work publicly.

The sky report and hazard report system let anyone contribute real-time observations. The station network made hyperlocal data available at block-level granularity. The forum culture attracted people who were actually doing amateur meteorology — running model comparisons, making their own predictions, building track records over years.

None of the alternatives that fill Weather Underground's SEO footprint today — getambee, Slant, AlternativeTo — are anything like what WU was. They're generic weather app review aggregators. They have nothing to offer a forecaster.

The real question isn't "what weather app looks like WU." It's: where does the WU forecaster community go now?

Why the consumer weather apps don't fill the gap

| Feature | Weather Underground (Now) | Windy | Weather.com | ForecasterHQ | |---------|--------------------------|-------|-------------|--------------| | Community forecasts | None (removed) | None | None | ✓ — your forecast, your name | | Named forecaster identity | None | None | None | ✓ — dedicated profile page | | Publish your own predictions | No | No | No | ✓ — map regions, accumulations, timing | | Own your subscriber list | No | No | No | ✓ — email subscribers, no platform lock | | Forecast verification | No | No | No | ✓ — NWS observation matching | | Embeds for your site | No | No | No | ✓ — <iframe> widget | | Free to use | Ads-heavy | Free tier (gutted) | Ad-heavy | Free to start |

The consumer weather apps — Windy, Weather.com, Accuweather — were never built for the person making forecasts. They were built for the person consuming them. Weather Underground at least had the community layer. Now it doesn't have that either.

What WU station owners and community forecasters actually need

If you were an active member of Weather Underground's community, you were probably doing one or more of these things:

Contributing personal weather station data to build the local observation network
Reading and posting in forums about model runs, pattern setups, and event post-mortems
Making your own forecasts and sharing them — or at least having a place to discuss them
Building a track record and reputation among people who understood what you were doing

The consumer weather apps address none of that. They're consumption tools. They don't let you publish. They don't let you build a forecaster identity. They don't have verification systems that show whether your predictions were accurate.

ForecasterHQ was built specifically for the forecasting layer.

Draw your forecast regions on an interactive map. Assign accumulation ranges, timing windows, and weather parameters by region. Publish. Get your own forecaster profile URL. Build an email subscriber list. After the event, see how your predictions compared to NWS observation data — verified, scored, displayed publicly on your profile.

The pain point WU never solved

Here's something Weather Underground never figured out, even in its best years: it was a great place to share observations and post in forums, but it had no structured way to publish a forecast.

You could upload weather station data. You could post in community forums. But a structured prediction — "I'm calling 6-10 inches in this specific region, here's my map, event window Thursday night through Saturday noon, here's how I'll know if I was right" — had no home on WU. You'd describe it in text in a forum post and hope someone could follow along.

ForecasterHQ is what WU would have built if it had understood what its most engaged users were actually trying to do.

The credibility layer the community actually needs

Weather Underground's decline also created a trust vacuum. When its content was degrading and its temperature data was running 11°F hot, the amateur forecasters who had built reputations there had no good way to carry their track records anywhere else.

ForecasterHQ's verification system exists to solve exactly this problem. Every forecast you publish is timestamped. After the event, NWS observation data is pulled automatically and matched against your drawn regions. Your profile shows your accuracy record — not just a number, but the full strip-plot visualization showing where your predictions landed versus what was observed.

That track record is portable. It lives on your ForecasterHQ profile URL, not in someone else's forum, not buried in archived posts from a platform that's being wound down.

For personal weather station owners

If you're a PWS owner who used Weather Underground primarily for the station contribution network — you were uploading your data, contributing to the hyperlocal observation density that made WU valuable — there are dedicated alternatives for the data upload function: WeatherCloud, WeatherLink.com (Davis), PWSWeather.com, and others maintain observation networks.

For a detailed comparison of the best station upload platforms — including which ones work with Ambient Weather, Davis, and Ecowitt hardware — see weather underground pws alternatives for station owners.

But if you've ever wanted to use that hyperlocal data to actually make and publish forecasts — that's the ForecasterHQ use case. Your local observation data, combined with model analysis, turned into a structured forecast with a permanent URL and a subscriber list.

The observation contribution and the forecast publishing are two different workflows. ForecasterHQ handles the second one.

Where the serious community went

The Weather Underground community that was doing real forecasting work has scattered, but most of them ended up on some combination of:

X/Twitter (forecasting posts, storm chasers)
Facebook Groups (local community weather groups)
Substack (serious forecasters building newsletter audiences)
YouTube (video walkthroughs for events)

For the full history of how WU's community formed, what made it different, and exactly how it unraveled — see what happened to Weather Underground's forecaster community.

What none of those provide is a structured home that understands what a forecast actually is. They're general-purpose platforms being used for weather because there was nothing better. If you were specifically a WU forecaster — someone who published predictions, not just data — the Weather Underground forecaster alternative covers what's changed and where that workflow has a real home now.

ForecasterHQ is the something better.

Browse the forecasters already on ForecasterHQ →

Claim your free ForecasterHQ page →

It's free to start. No credit card. Your first forecast takes less than ten minutes to publish.