These Weather Apps Help You Track Tropical Storm Arthur and Other Severe Summer Storms

Carrot Weather gives you the weather with a little personality. Here’s the twist: You can pick what kind of personality you want the app to have, from Professional, which disables banter, to Overkill — expect some heavy profanity. You can even select which politics the app personifies, from apolitical to anarchist.

This app gives you access to standard weather information like daily temperatures, weather conditions and future forecasts. It’s also easy to find other environmental information, like the current phase of the moon and the UV index, on the app’s homepage compared to some other weather apps.

The app is unique in that you can “bond” with it by charging, praising or debugging it from the Carrot tab. Charging is simply tapping a power source on screen, praising requires you to speak to the app via your phone’s microphone and debugging asks you to shake your phone. Once you’ve bonded with the app enough, you can start messaging with a chatbot in the app. This is definitely unique among other weather apps on this list.

While this app can be funny and give you a good breakdown of the weather, it doesn’t offer a radar with the free version of the app.

On the surface, Carrot Weather’s privacy policy seems straightforward. It says the app only collects information that is “absolutely necessary” for the service to work. Later, it says your information might be shared with other services, like AccuWeather.

The policy also notes that the chatbot mentioned above uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT service. The policy says it sends these messages to an intermediary server to try and stop personally identifiable info from being passed on to third parties. But the content of the messages is passed on to OpenAI’s servers, which “may collect, process, and store information about you that it gleans from the messages that you send.”

You can download the free version of Carrot Weather from the App Store and the Google Play Store. You can also subscribe to the premium version of the app for $5 a month (or $20 a year), the premium ultra version for $10 a month (or $40 a year) or premium family for $15 a month (or $60 per year).