Weather Underground PWS Owners: The Best Alternatives for Your Personal Weather Station

You spent real money on your station. Maybe a few hundred dollars on an Ambient Weather setup, or several hundred more on a Davis Vantage Pro. You mounted it, calibrated it, watched it through its first winter. You uploaded to Weather Underground because it put your data on the map — literally. Your station showed up. People in your neighborhood could see it. NWS forecasters referenced station networks like yours.

Then Weather Underground's station infrastructure fell apart.

Station call signs changed without notice in 2024 and 2025. Temperature readings ran as much as 11°F off — and stayed that way for months with no fix from support. The station neighbor comparison features disappeared. The visibility dashboards were gutted. The community layer that made your station feel like it mattered to someone? Gone, along with the forecasts, webcams, and customer service that used to accompany it.

If you're a PWS owner looking for where to go now, here's an honest guide — both for the immediate question (where do I upload my station data?) and the one that might interest you more than you'd expect (what do I do if I want to do more than just contribute numbers?).

The two problems you're probably trying to solve

It helps to separate these clearly, because the answer to each is different:

Problem 1: Data contribution. You want your station's observations on a reliable public map. You want your readings to be visible to your neighborhood, your local emergency managers, maybe NWS forecasters. You want a platform that isn't going to corrupt your temperature data or silently change your station ID.

Problem 2: Recognition and publishing. You want to be known for your station. You want local weather followers who check your data. Maybe you've thought about writing up your own forecasts — you have the most accurate hyperlocal data in your area, you follow model runs, and you've been right enough times that people already ask you what's coming. You want to go from uploading numbers to publishing forecasts based on those numbers.

Most displaced WU PWS owners are solving Problem 1. Some are ready for Problem 2 and don't know it yet.

This guide covers both, in order.

Part 1: Where to move your station data

These are the real alternatives for the observation-contribution workflow. They vary by hardware compatibility, community size, and how visible your station will be.

| Platform | Best for | Hardware compatibility | Community layer | Cost | |----------|----------|----------------------|-----------------|------| | WeatherCloud | Best all-around WU replacement | Most stations via Ecowitt, Ambient, Davis, WS2300 | Strong — maps, dashboards, neighbor comparisons | Free; Premium ~$30/yr | | PWSWeather.com | Community-focused station owners | Most stations via software bridge | Rankings, maps, station pages | Free | | AmbientWeather.net | Ambient Weather hardware owners | Ambient Weather native | Station map, dashboard | Free | | WeatherLink.com | Davis/Vantage Pro owners | Davis native (best integration) | Limited community layer | Free with Davis hardware | | Ecowitt EasyWeather / Ecowitt.net | Ecowitt hardware owners | Ecowitt native (fastest-growing brand) | Station map | Free | | CWOP / APRS | Scientific contribution focus | Most stations via software | No community layer | Free | | MesoWest (Synoptic) | Research-grade aggregation | Broad compatibility | No community layer | Free (data contribution) |

WeatherCloud — the closest thing to old WU

If your main WU use was the station community and visibility — being on the map, seeing your neighbors, having a public station page — WeatherCloud is the most direct replacement. It has active station density in most of the US and Europe, a functioning comparison tool, and station dashboards that show your data in a clean format.

It supports most popular station brands through direct connection or Ecowitt's gateway. The free tier covers most what WU's station features used to offer. Premium adds unlimited history and additional display options if you care about the data archive.

PWSWeather.com — for the community layer specifically

PWSWeather.com is smaller than WeatherCloud but specifically designed around the community of station owners rather than casual weather consumers. It has station rankings, community forums, and a culture that's closer to what WU's station network felt like in its better years. If you miss the social layer of WU station ownership, PWSWeather is worth signing up for alongside wherever you upload primary data.

Your hardware manufacturer's own platform

Ambient Weather, Davis, and Ecowitt all have their own platforms that give you tighter hardware integration than any third-party service:

AmbientWeather.net — if you bought Ambient hardware, this is the native destination. Direct integration, no bridge software needed, works fine as a primary or backup destination.
WeatherLink.com — Davis's platform is solid if you own a Vantage Pro or similar Davis station. The Davis ecosystem is well-maintained and the platform hasn't experienced the same degradation as WU.
Ecowitt.net / EasyWeather — Ecowitt has grown faster than any other PWS brand in the past three years. Their app and web platform are actively developed.

Most stations can upload to multiple services simultaneously. There's no reason to pick only one.

What about CWOP?

CWOP (Citizens Weather Observer Program) is the NOAA-backed data contribution network that feeds into official METAR observations. If scientific contribution and NWS utility is your goal — contributing to the observational record — CWOP is the right answer. It has no community layer, no station visibility map for the general public, and no social component. But your data goes into the same network that NWS forecasters use.

You can upload to CWOP alongside WeatherCloud or PWSWeather — they're not mutually exclusive. Many serious station owners do both.

What ForecasterHQ does (and doesn't do)

Before Part 2, the honest clarification: ForecasterHQ does not collect station observation data.

We're not on the list above because we're not a station upload platform. We don't have a station network, a live observation map, or a CWOP feed.

What ForecasterHQ does is let you publish forecasts. Draw your forecast regions on an interactive map. Assign predicted accumulation ranges, timing windows, temperature parameters. Publish. Get a permanent URL for your forecast. Build an email subscriber list. After the event, see how your predictions matched NWS observations — verified, scored, displayed publicly on your profile.

If your goal is to contribute data and stay visible as a station owner, start with WeatherCloud and PWSWeather.com above.

If you've ever thought about going further than that — using your local data to actually publish structured predictions — that's Part 2.

Part 2: Going from data upload to publishing forecasts

Here's something worth considering: you already have the best hyperlocal data in your neighborhood.

Your station has been logging temperature, humidity, wind speed, and precipitation at higher resolution than any NWS sensor for miles around. You know the microclimate effects in your area better than any model does — how your valley traps cold air, how the lake moderates your temperatures, when your ridgeline catches precip that misses the town below. That's genuinely valuable information that doesn't exist anywhere else.

WU station owners in its best years weren't just uploading data. The most engaged ones were writing forecast discussions in forums, calling events, building local reputations as the person to follow during storms. When WU degraded, that publishing capability disappeared entirely — the forums went quiet, the visibility was lost, and there was no replacement for the identity layer that came with being a known local station owner.

ForecasterHQ is the answer to that specific problem.

What a PWS owner's workflow on ForecasterHQ looks like

Before an event: You're watching model runs for your area. You notice a pattern your local data supports — your station has been logging the cold sector air mass moving in exactly the way the GFS is showing. You draw your forecast regions on the ForecasterHQ map, assign accumulation ranges (6-10" for your valley zone, 3-6" for the ridge, 1-3" for the lowland corridor), set your event window.
Publish: Your forecast gets a permanent URL. You share it with your neighborhood Facebook group, your local fire department's weather contact, your Twitter followers who already know you as the person with the accurate local data.
After the event: ForecasterHQ pulls NWS observation data and matches it against your drawn regions. Your profile shows the strip-plot visualization — where your predictions landed versus what was actually recorded. Over time, your profile shows a track record that's publicly verifiable.

That track record is the thing WU never let you build. Forum posts got archived, then deleted. Station rankings showed your data quality, not your forecast accuracy. ForecasterHQ gives you a portfolio of predictions with outcomes attached.

For more on what this workflow looks like, see the backyard meteorologist's guide to publishing forecasts — which covers exactly this transition from local observation data to structured forecast publishing — along with how to publish your first weather forecast and the full indie forecaster tool stack.

The two-platform answer

The clearest path for a serious displaced WU station owner:

For your data: WeatherCloud + your hardware manufacturer's platform + CWOP if you care about scientific contribution. Upload to all three. Your station's data is too valuable to depend on any single platform.

For your identity: Once you're comfortable with your data upload situation, consider whether you want to publish forecasts. If your neighborhood already treats you as the local weather authority, ForecasterHQ gives that role a home with a permanent URL, a subscriber list, and a verification record that travels with you.

The observation upload and the forecast publishing are two different workflows. The first keeps your station visible. The second turns your station data into a public forecasting practice.

Practical steps for migrating your station

Check your hardware's native platform first — most Ambient, Davis, and Ecowitt stations have direct integrations that require no software bridge. Start there.
Sign up for WeatherCloud — the free tier covers most WU station features. If you have more than one station or want extended history, the $30/year premium is reasonable.
Set up PWSWeather.com — it takes 15 minutes and most stations support simultaneous uploads, so there's no cost to having a presence on both.
Migrate CWOP if you were contributing there — check your current CWOP station record and update it if your call sign or location changed during WU's station ID changes.
Set your old WU station to point to your new primary — some station software lets you add WU as a secondary destination even while pointing to WeatherCloud as primary; others require choosing one. Check your station's upload software configuration.

For more on understanding what happened to Weather Underground's community and where the rest of the forecasting community went, see what happened to Weather Underground's community and the broader Weather Underground alternatives for forecasters.

Building something worth following

The thing WU never gave its most engaged station owners was a publishing platform. You could upload data indefinitely and stay completely anonymous except to the people who happened to check your specific station on the map.

If you've spent years building the most accurate local observation network in your neighborhood, that expertise is worth more than a dot on someone else's map.

Claim your free ForecasterHQ page → — no credit card, no setup fee. Your first forecast takes less than ten minutes to publish.