I’ve been using U.S. based (I think) services on my Google homepage to check the weather in Japan for over a year and the results have been just ok. Sometimes the Fukuoka weather forecast is accurate, but a lot of times it’s off. For example WeatherUnderground or Google’s weather widget will say it’s going to be a warm sunny day, but my wife tells me it’s going to rain. Sure enough, it rains and the temps drop, and that’s when widgets on my home page change their forecast. I know that I’m getting some bad information when I’m walking around with an umbrella and 99% of the people I see don’t have one.

Directly on a website like Weather.com the weather forecast seem accurate, but I want to see weather on my Google homepage without having to click around. I think the main issue is there’s not enough information about the day displayed. For example, here’s today’s Google widget. It shows today as partly cloudy and tomorrow as a rainy day, but it’s probably going to rain between 11pm-3am.

Last week I found a Japanese widget in English that shows weather from Yahoo Japan. So far it’s been awesome! It shows the weather changes through out the day for today and tomorrow and then gives an extended forecast. Here’s a screen shot so you can compare it to the Google widget weather. I like the 3-hour window of information.

It has a lot of locations and options to choose from and can display Celcius or Farenheit. It also reads the language you’re using for Google and automatically choose English or Japanese for you. If you use Google as your homepage, I recommend this widget. You can find it by searching “pinpoint weather japan” or by visiting this site for more info.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 9:13 am and is filed under Life in Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.