Weather widgets for your iPad

Over the years, we’ve covered dozens of ways to stay up to date with the latest METARs, TAFs and weather radar. The options range from favorite airports in your aviation EFB app to dedicated weather apps and even right on your wrist with aviation weather apps for Apple Watch.

One of our favorite ways to do this is with iOS home screen widgets, which allow you to display key data from compatible apps on your iPad or iPhone’s home screen. Here are three aviation apps that offer this capability.

Windy

Windy is one of our favorite dedicated weather apps thanks to its beautifully animated visualizations of current and forecast weather conditions on an interactive map. Windy is much more than a pretty face, though, and offers a comprehensive collection of weather products, including airport METARs/TAFs, NOTAMs, and radar.

Windy is one of the few apps we’ve found that offers a weather radar widget for your home device’s homescreen. Best of all, it’s completely free.

After installing the free app and opening it at least once, tap and hold anywhere on your iPad’s home screen to enter the “edit” mode. Then tap the gray “+” button at the top left of the home screen to view a list of your currently installed apps that support widgets. Select Windy from the list and scroll through the options until you see the Radar Widget option:

Once the widget is on your home screen, tap and hold it to customize settings such as location and zoom.

StationWeather

StationWeather is a preflight planning tool for pilots designed to display and decode METARs and TAFs in a full-color graphical view. The app fully supports customized home screen widgets, including the extra-large format option for iPad.

After installing the free app and signing up for a Pro subscription (or a free trial), you’ll be able to choose from 11 different graphical METAR or TAF widgets:

Each widget can only show either a METAR or a TAF, but you can add multiple widgets to show both the report and forecast side by side for an airport if desired:

StationWeather Pro is free to try for a week, and then an annual subscription is available for $7.99/yr.

METAR Widgets

METAR Widgets displays current airport conditions in a simple widget design. While it offers fewer display and customization options (and no TAFs), it is also less expensive as a one-time purchase price of $1.99. You can choose to add a Smart widget, which uses graphics to display the current report, or Retro, which displays the plain text from the METAR.