Tracking the sky: custom locations and forecasts in elementary OS

elementary OS continues to deliver a polished, distraction-free desktop, and its native Weather app fits that philosophy neatly. Tucked into the system as a small but capable utility, the app pulls data from reliable meteorological sources and presents it in a calm interface that does not interrupt your workflow. For anyone who travels, lives far from family, or simply likes to keep an eye on conditions in several places, the Weather app quietly becomes one of the most-used panels on the desktop.

The appeal grows when you start to personalise it. Adding custom locations, switching between metric and imperial units, and tuning how forecasts appear make the app feel like a tool built around your daily routine rather than a generic widget. Whether you are planning a weekend drive along the Great Ocean Road, coordinating with colleagues in different time zones, or just curious about tomorrow's heat in Brisbane, the app is ready to adapt.

Finding and opening the Weather app

The Weather app lives in the Applications menu and is also pinned to the dock on fresh installs. A single click launches it, and the first screen you see is the forecast for the location your system detected during setup. If you skipped that step or have moved since installing, the app will gently prompt you to choose a starting point the next time it opens.

The interface is intentionally minimal. A large current-temperature display dominates the top of the window, followed by a short summary of conditions, humidity, wind, and a brief hourly timeline. Below that sits a multi-day forecast with a row of icons that tell you whether to expect sun, clouds, rain, or something more dramatic. From this single window you can already decide whether the afternoon in Hobart calls for a jacket or sunglasses, without leaving your workspace.

If you prefer a more compact view, enable the Weather indicator from the Wingpanel settings in System Settings. Once active, a small icon with the current temperature and a brief outlook appears at the top of the screen, expanding into a richer view on click. This is especially useful on laptops where screen space is precious.

Adding custom locations around Australia and beyond

The app really shines once you start adding multiple locations. Press the plus button or use the keyboard shortcut, and a search field appears. Type the name of the city you want to track — Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, Cairns, or any smaller town — and the app returns a list of matching places pulled from a global gazetteer.

A practical habit for Australians is to build a small constellation of locations that reflect the parts of your life. A common combination includes your current suburb for daily planning, the home of a family member in another state, and perhaps the nearest major hub if you live outside a capital city. People who travel regularly for work sometimes add Canberra, Melbourne and Brisbane so they can glance at conditions before flying.

Reordering locations is simple: drag the city tiles into the order that makes the most sense for you. The first entry stays as your default and shows whenever you reopen the app or check the Wingpanel indicator. Removing a city is just as straightforward — long-press or right-click to bring up the delete option. This makes it easy to rotate locations seasonally, perhaps swapping in a coastal town during summer holidays and replacing it with an inland destination during the cooler months.

Reading the forecast: what the numbers and icons mean

elementary OS's Weather app uses a clean visual language that takes a little learning if you are used to dense meteorological dashboards. The current temperature sits in large type, accompanied by a small icon for the dominant condition — a sun, a cloud, a raindrop, or a thunderstorm glyph. Beneath that, additional metrics such as "feels like" temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity, and pressure appear in plain language.

The hourly forecast is where the app earns its keep. Scrolling horizontally reveals temperature, precipitation chance, and a condition icon for each hour. This is especially useful in places like Melbourne, where locals often joke that the city experiences all four seasons between breakfast and dinner. A quick glance before stepping out can save you from being caught in a southerly buster with nothing but a t-shirt.

The multi-day outlook stretches further into the future, usually covering the next week. It focuses on high and low temperatures, a short description, and a chance-of-rain percentage. Treat extended forecasts as a guide rather than gospel — meteorologists regularly point out that accuracy drops sharply beyond about three days, particularly in the tropics where storms build quickly during the wet season.

Customising units, formats and display preferences

Because the elementary OS audience spans many regions, the Weather app respects your preferences for units and formats. Open System Settings, head to Applications, then Weather, and you will find toggles for temperature units (Celsius or Fahrenheit), wind speed in kilometres per hour, miles per hour, metres per second, or knots, and pressure in millibars, hectopascals, inches of mercury, or millimetres of mercury.

An Australian user will most likely want metric throughout — degrees Celsius, kilometres per hour, and hectopascals. Switching the time format to 24-hour is also worth doing if you prefer to avoid the AM/PM ambiguity that creeps into early morning or late evening forecasts. For those coordinating with friends and family in Perth, toggling the time zone reference is useful since western states stay on AWST all year while eastern states move between AEST and AEDT.

Display preferences go beyond units. You can decide whether the app opens directly to the hourly view or the weekly forecast, choose how many hours to show per page, and pick a custom refresh interval. If you live in a regional area where the internet is sometimes patchy, a longer refresh interval reduces data usage without leaving you stuck with outdated information.

Notifications and severe weather alerts

Weather is not always gentle, and the app handles that reality through optional notifications. When a significant change is forecast for any of your saved locations, the system can send a discreet alert to the notification centre. This includes sharp temperature drops, incoming rain, or strong wind events.

For Australians, this is where the practical value shines. Tropical cyclones are an annual concern along the northern coast from November through April, while severe thunderstorm warnings can pop up almost anywhere during the warmer months. Even a simple "storms expected this afternoon" heads-up can be the difference between getting home safely and ending up drenched at the bus stop. If your work involves outdoor elements, whether it is market gardening, construction, or coaching junior sport, keeping alerts on for the relevant locations is a small habit that pays off.

Notifications can be silenced per location if you only want them for certain places. Parents who want to know about conditions at their children's school without being notified about the weather at their own office can configure the app to treat only specific cities as alert-worthy. The same trick helps travellers who care about conditions at their destination but not their current suburb.

Working around connectivity and cached forecasts

Weather data depends on the internet, but the app handles brief outages gracefully. Once a forecast has loaded, it is cached locally so you can still view past data even if the network drops out. This is reassuring for people living in regional or remote parts of Australia where mobile coverage can be intermittent, such as the pastoral zones of western New South Wales or the Kimberley region in the country's north.

When a connection returns, the app refreshes automatically on its next scheduled interval. If you want it to update sooner, simply pull down on the forecast view or close and reopen the window. There is also a manual refresh action accessible through the menu, which is helpful when you are about to make a decision that depends on the very latest reading — for example, deciding whether to launch a drone before an approaching front or setting off on an outback road trip.

For users who prefer to keep their data usage minimal, the app respects a system-wide network setting that limits background activity. Combined with a longer refresh interval, this keeps the Weather app light enough to run comfortably on a tethered connection or a capped satellite plan, an important consideration on remote stations where data is precious.

Pairing Weather with other tools and workflows

The real pleasure of elementary OS is how well its applications work together, and Weather is no exception. Many users open the app in a small floating window and keep it tucked in a corner while they work, ready to glance at when planning their afternoon. Others use a small script that pulls the current temperature into a daily note, automatically logging conditions alongside other observations.

If you sketch weather patterns or annotate forecasts by hand, the app pairs naturally with creative tools on the desktop. A recent guide on using a Wacom tablet walks through note-taking and drawing, providing a calm canvas for visualising pressure systems or rainfall totals in your own style.

Students of horticulture, viticulture, or simply keen gardeners can use the app as a basic decision-support tool. Tracking frost warnings, heat spikes, and rainfall across a week helps with timing irrigation, pruning, and planting. Combining the Weather app's data with a simple spreadsheet or task manager creates a lightweight alternative to dedicated agricultural weather services, without locking you into a subscription.

The Weather app rewards a few minutes of attention. Set it up with the locations and units that reflect how you actually live, enable alerts where they matter, and let it fade into the background. Whether you are looking out the window from a sandstone cottage in Adelaide, an apartment in Surry Hills, or a farmhouse in Tasmania's Huon Valley, having reliable atmospheric context one click away changes the way a desktop fits into daily life. It turns the elementary OS Weather panel from a small utility into a quiet companion that always knows what the sky is doing.