Here’s a dirty secret of many online weather services. I’ve also seen this secret used by TV and RADIO weather forecasters for many years. Timely United States weather forecasts are distributed primarily from one organization. And they’re available online, for free and without any annoying banner advertisements or user registrations.

The site is NOAA - short for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For several year’s I’ve noticed that many weather sites seem to scrape the forecast from the main NOAA.GOV site.

When NOAA updated, so did these weather sites. Some of which sell online memberships.

And NOAA also operates a WAP site where you can access their current forecasts on your cell phone. The forecasts are all text based so they’re very fast to download and give you only the information you need (aka - NO Advertising!).

To check weather for any US location, enter in the zip code:

Here’s the resulting forecast. If you cross check the wording shown here to some online pay weather sites - you may notice that they feature nearly identical forecasts - updated with the same frequency as NOAA.GOV.

Certainly some of the pay sites offer additional features such as alerts and daily weather emails that may make them worth subscribing for. However in a pinch, when all you need is an updated forecasts - you can’t beat the NOAA site!

Link: NOAA Weather - Via Web Browser
Link: NOAA Weather - Via WAP (formatted for your WAP cell phone - text interface)
Link: NOAA Weather - Via Basic HTML (iPhone and other html capable phones)