As much as people make fun of me for turning to my iPhone for the weather ("why don't you just look outside?"), it's helped me avoid any number of climate-related mishaps. Wearing jeans in 95° heat, for example. Or remembering to bring a raincoat to the baseball game. But for those interested in the finer details of meteorology, the built-in Weather app sometimes falls a bit short.

There are any number of weather programs available on the App Store (I count eight as of this writing), but WeatherBug is arguably the most prominent (as well as one of the cheapest). Long popular as a Windows desktop app, WeatherBug also makes an OS X Dashboard widget and menubar application. Last year, the company created a Web application aimed at iPhone users. So it's little surprise that they've decided to jump on the native application bandwagon.

The iPhone version of WeatherBug allows you to track weather in three different locations around the world, which you can enter via ZIP code, city and state, or city and country. WeatherBug can also take advantage of the iPhone's location services to add your current location. For most locations, WeatherBug will give you a list of weather stations it knows about in the vicinity, along with information about how close they are to the target you specified.

Once you've picked your locations, WeatherBug provides detailed reports on current conditions at the weather station, including temperature (only in Fahrenheit; there's no option for Celsius), highs and lows, precipitation, wind speed, heat index, humidity, and dew point. There's also a three-day forecast with highs and lows and an icon representing general weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy). Tapping on any of the days will display a written mini-forecast for that day, along with arrows that let you view consecutive days. Though the main screen displays only the next three days, using those arrows allows you to go up to a week in the future--but that feature isn't immediately obvious; I found it by chance.

You can also switch back and forth between the locations you're tracking using the arrows next to the location names. I often found these controls to be unresponsive, requiring repeated taps before registering; it would have been nice to be able to swipe back and forth to view different locations, as Apple's Weather application allows you to do. Also, some weather station or place names are too long and get cut off or bleed into the adjacent location descriptions.

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