Facebook is updating their app with a full weather forecast so you can stop relying on a separate weather application to get your daily dose of information on how warm or cold it will be, and whether or not you’ll need an umbrella before you step out of the house on your way to work, school, or anywhere else. The update has already started to roll out to users of the mobile app (on both Android and iOS) as well as the desktop site, and there are a couple of ways to access it if you’re keen on using Facebook to check the weather.
While the weather will pull up in the news feed directly, if you tap on the “more” menu within the app you can head to the weather page from there, which is where you can see the full weather forecast with details like the temperature, highs and lows, and whether or not there will be a heavy thunderstorm, rain showers, or if the day will be partly cloudy. A carousel slider just below the main weather for the current day will show you a brief display of the weather conditions and the temperature hour by hour for what seems like a ten-hour period from the current time forward. Just below that you’ll see the the forecast for the next five days. While this is certainly useful, especially if you open up the Facebook application often, it’s not quite as detailed or informative as the weather information you will get from Google Now which has a 10-day forecast, as well as hour by hour temperature and conditions details for both the current day and the following day.
That being said, it’s a step up from Facebook’s previous weather efforts which are Weather Greetings, as Facebook calls them, and would also show up in the news feed but had much less detail than the new weather feature. There are a few customization options that you can set, like your location and the use of Celsius or Fahrenheit for the temperature measurement, which can be accessed from the settings menu. Normally though the weather will just show you what it’s like at your current location, so if you aren’t actively checking Facebook for the weather details for somewhere else where you’re planning to be, you can just head straight to it and check it for your local area. While the weather feature should already be available to about 95% of users at this point according to Facebook, the company is also updating the weather greetings to be more detailed, and they’ll be adding in an option to set notifications for weather information to show up at certain times set by the user. These two things are currently being tested but Facebook plans to roll them out to users by the end of February. All of the details are powered by The Weather Channel (weather.com) and if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the weather page in Facebook, you’ll see a link that will take you to weather.com within the Facebook browser.
