You Need Your Poncho Today

Weather. We all have to endure it — from steamy summer days to bone-chilling winter nights (here in the Midwest anyway) we have to endure whatever Mother Nature sends our way. Who doesn’t care about the weather?

“Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all…” 

(Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now” )

We get our weather from so many places these days, and it seems everyone is throwing numbers and percentages and fancy graphics at us — and all we need to know is: “What is the weather going to be today?”

Did you know you can get a snappy, simple, weather report for the current day sent to your cell phone, tablet, or PC every morning, and it’s not like any other forecast you’ve ever seen? Yes, you can.  It’s simple and clever — and useful. Here take a look:

Poncho is a free service and it’s relatively new, so if you live in an out-of-the-way  little burg like I do, there may not be forecasts available for your area — have no fear, you can leave your email address with Poncho and they’ll let you know when service has expanded to cover your little two-bit town 🙂

We must let the innovative, imaginative developers of Poncho to say a few words to you:

For centuries human beings have been trying to predict the weather, or more precisely what will fall from the sky today. The history of meteorology as a science goes all the way back to Aristotle. Over a century ago, meteorology became advanced enough to start (sort of) reliably predicting weather patterns. But as computing power increased, we hit information overload — and we needed a human to boil down the sea of numbers into simple advice. We were not sure exactly what it meant when the barometric pressure was falling, but weather forecasters told us to bring umbrellas, and we did.

But then a funny thing happened. The internet and, more recently, smartphones began to deliver real-time weather information. While this certainly looked like progress — more data available anytime, anywhere — the experience actually got worse instead of better. On the internet, weather again seemed like a sea of numbers. We want to fix that. And so Poncho was born…

I love the concept of Poncho. Some days you just need to know if it’s going to rain or snow or be warm or cold — you don’t need to know every single statistic, percentage, number, etc. “Hey, what are the chances I’m going to need my umbrella today?” Some days that’s all you need to know. Right? Right!

So, take a trip to Poncho and see if they have forecasts for your area. If not, oh well, maybe some day.