If you’re a weather dweeb like I am, WeatherCyclopedia will send you sky high. Telemet, the developer, bills this app as “The Most Comprehensive Weather Encyclopedia Under the Sun,” and I believe it.

I can’t begin to describe all the topics WeatherCyclopedia covers, but its chapters include how weather is created, the elements, climate zones, geographical and seasonal variances,  weather forecasting, history of meteorology, nonscientific ways to predict weather and on and on and on.

I never knew just how much I never knew about the weather, or something like that.

WeatherCyclopedia is exceptionally well organized too. Here’s a quick example: To read about precipitation, you’ll start at The Creation of Weather and then go through a nest of sub-chapters (Weather Builders, Elements) and then finally to Precipitation, where you find everything you might want to know followed by links to how clouds form, formation models, precipitation measurements and more.

Every topic is linked to every to other related topic in a way that allows you to branch out in any direction to explore a topic in depth. In addition to text, you’ll have the option of hyperlinking to animation, photos, charts and a glossary that provides even more detail.

Animation, photos and charts also are organized into indexes, but rather than the conventional list of text, you get thumbnails representing each subject. Thumbnails in the index are not labeled, however, and are organized for browsing rather than to find a specific topic, which you do from the page you’re reading.

WeatherCyclopedia tends to run slowly when you try to access content-rich images and animation. It’s either the app is not as well optimized as it could be or overly ambitious given the platform’s limitations.

Telemet’s main line of work is to provide weather services to companies around the globe. If you’re a petroleum company with offshore drilling platforms, for example, you would rely on Telemet to give you a head’s up if there’s a hurricane brewing. I assume the company has taken the wealth of data it has on hand and shoehorned as much of it as it could into WeatherCyclopedia. What also makes me think that’s why Telemet titled this app “WeatherCyclodpedia” but throughout the app, it’s titled “Didactio,” which I believe is one of it’s products.

Regardless, if you tend to be impatient, you’re not going to like waiting as much as 20 seconds for some animations to load.

It’s truly an interactive encyclopedia that’s capable of taking you wherever you would like to go in the world. WeatherCyclopedia is $10 but a true weather enthusiast shouldn’t object to the price.

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category: Editor's Picks, Utilities, Weather