weather desktop is a small native weather app that lives in your system tray — current conditions, a minute-by-minute rain nowcast, an hourly and seven-day forecast with pixel-art icons, air quality, an in-app weather radar, and weather alerts that actually know when to leave you alone.
It's built with SDL2 + Dear ImGui + OpenGL and pulls weather, air quality and geocoding from Open-Meteo (no API key, no account), official US alerts from the NWS, and aurora data from NOAA — all free. Add as many locations as you like (search, exact coordinates, or detect-via-OS), flip between °F/°C, and let it sit in the tray updating quietly in the background — hover the tray icon for a quick-look card.
Alerts that respect your night
It watches for severe weather, big temperature swings, rain, snow, hail, high wind and freezing precipitation, and surfaces them as floating toasts plus a tray notification. You decide when: as they happen, only outside quiet hours, or batched into a single daily digest. A notification center keeps the history so you can acknowledge and review what's blown through.
Sky
A dedicated panel for the sky: a sunrise→sunset arc with the sun at the current time and a "Sunset/Sunrise in …" countdown, the current moon phase with illumination, a rough aurora chance for your latitude (from NOAA's free planetary K-index feed), and any meteor showers that are active — with a heads-up when one is near its peak.
Radar
An in-app, animated weather radar (RainViewer past + nowcast frames) you can play, scrub, pan and zoom — each frame labeled with the time it represents, and a wind gauge in the corner. The basemap underneath (coastlines, state/country/county lines, interstates, city labels) is drawn locally from public-domain Natural Earth data, so the only request that leaves your machine is for the radar tile itself.
Get it
Grab the Windows build below — it's portable: unzip and run WeatherDesktop.exe (keep the resources\ folder and DLLs next to it). The source is on GitHub under the MIT license.
// RELEASES //
The big one: an in-app weather radar. Also a rotating info carousel and light/dark themes. Also on GitHub Releases.
What's new
- Weather radar — an animated radar overlay (RainViewer past + nowcast frames) with play/scrub, per-frame timestamps, drag-pan and wheel-zoom, and an on-map wind gauge. The basemap — coastlines, state/country/county lines, interstates and city labels — is drawn locally from public-domain Natural Earth, so the only thing any server sees is the radar tile request itself. Deep zoom upscales the data instead of going blank. - Sky carousel — the Sky panel now auto-cycles (pausing on hover) through an air-quality breakdown, the NWS Area Forecast Discussion, an almanac (today vs. the 1991–2020 normal), and tides & marine. - Daily takeaway — a one-line plain-language summary atop the current conditions. - Rain push alerts — a heads-up when rain is about to start; clicking a notification opens the app. - Light / dark themes — selectable in Settings.
Unzip and run WeatherDesktop.exe; keep the resources\ folder and the bundled DLLs alongside it. Weather, air-quality, marine and climate data come from Open-Meteo, alerts and the forecast discussion from the US NWS, tides from NOAA, and radar from RainViewer — all free, no API key.
First run on Windows. The build isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn "Windows protected your PC." Click More info -> Run anyway. To verify the download, check its SHA-256 against the hash above:
Get-FileHash .\weather-desktop-1.2.0-win64.zip -Algorithm SHA256
A bigger, more accurate release — more data, more useful panels, and a snappier app. Also on GitHub Releases.
What's new
- Rain nowcast — a minute-by-minute "rain starting/stopping in ~N min" line. - Official US alerts — NWS watches and warnings, ranked above the app's own derived alerts. - More current data — air quality (US AQI), UV index, dew point, visibility, and barometric pressure with a 3-hour rising/steady/falling tendency. - Forecast confidence — the 7-day view shows a cross-model agreement chip (high/med/low) per day; the 24-hour view gets a temperature/precip trend chart aligned to the columns, with per-hour rain/snow amounts on hover. - Sky panel — a sunrise→sunset arc with the sun at the current time and a "Sunset/Sunrise in …" countdown, next to the moon, aurora and meteor readout. - Tray quick-look — hover the tray icon for a compact weather card. - Locations — enter exact coordinates or detect your location via the OS, plus a "vs yesterday" comparison. - Faster — the forecast paints immediately on launch (extras fill in after), and the app quits promptly instead of waiting out in-flight requests.
Unzip and run WeatherDesktop.exe; keep the resources\ folder and the bundled DLLs alongside it. Weather and air-quality data come from Open-Meteo, official alerts from the US NWS, and aurora data from NOAA SWPC — all free, no API key.
First run on Windows. The build isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn "Windows protected your PC." Click More info -> Run anyway. To verify the download, check its SHA-256 against the hash above:
Get-FileHash .\weather-desktop-1.1.0-win64.zip -Algorithm SHA256
First public release. A native tray weather app with forecasts, sky events, and alerts that know when to stay quiet.
What's in it
- Current conditions + forecasts — temperature, feels-like, humidity, wind, gusts, precip and cloud cover, a scrollable 24-hour view, and a seven-day outlook, all with pixel-art weather icons. - Smart alerts — severe weather, temperature swings, rain/snow/hail, high wind and freezing precipitation, shown as floating toasts and tray notifications, with a notification center to acknowledge and review them. - Notification scheduling — deliver alerts immediately, only outside quiet hours, or as one daily digest. - Tonight — moon phase with illumination, aurora chance for your latitude (NOAA Kp index), and active meteor showers. - Multiple locations, °F/°C + mph/km-h, and start-minimized.
Unzip and run WeatherDesktop.exe; keep the resources\ folder and the bundled DLLs alongside it. Weather data comes from Open-Meteo and aurora data from NOAA SWPC — both free, no API key.
First run on Windows. The build isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn "Windows protected your PC." Click More info -> Run anyway. To verify the download, check its SHA-256 against the hash above:
Get-FileHash .\weather-desktop-1.0.0-win64.zip -Algorithm SHA256