How it works

RivalWx is a weather prediction game for iOS and Android. Every day you make predictions about the weather where you are — temperature, precipitation, wind, conditions — and get scored against what actually happened.

It is not a weather app. It does not give you the forecast. It challenges you to make the forecast, then holds you to it when the day plays out.

Anyone who has looked at the sky and thought I don't think that forecast is right. Weather enthusiasts, storm spotters, meteorology students, and people who follow the weather more closely than they probably should.

Three difficulty modes mean you can start casual and work up — or go straight to Expert if you already know what you are doing.

RivalWx launches in late February 2027 on the App Store and Google Play — deliberately timed to the start of tornado season.

The public beta comes first: November 2026 on iPhone, December on Android, by invitation. Join the list at rivalwx.com or follow along on social to be invited.

Not at launch. RivalWx is built on National Weather Service data and US observation networks. There are no current plans to expand, though it is not off the table long term.

RivalWx is built and published by Isobar Works LLC — a game designer with 30 years across video, casual and mobile games, and a trained Skywarn spotter who has been watching the sky a great deal longer than that.

Two prediction windows a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. You call the weather for your location: high and low temperature, precipitation, wind, conditions. How many of those you get depends on your mode.

When the day closes out your calls are scored against real observations, and your Forecast Accuracy Rating updates as the scores land.

Yes. There is an adjustment window after each daily window closes — 1:30 to 2:30 in the afternoon after your morning call, and 1:30 to 2:30 in the morning after your evening one. If the sky has started telling a different story, refine your pick at full value.

There is also a 15-minute grace period right after a window shuts, for the days you were nearly on time. A grace submission still scores, at 80% of the points, and it does not count toward your streak. Miss the window entirely and it scores nothing.

Casual — a handful of predictions, a few minutes, a clean score.

Standard — more variables, tighter tolerances. The default for players who take weather seriously.

Expert — exact values, narrow tolerances, no rounding. Built for meteorologists and experienced spotters.

Casual and Standard are free. Expert needs Premium — or the free seven-day trial you earn at Standard Rank 5.

Your in-game rival. He makes his own daily call using the official weather service forecast as a baseline, then nudges it just enough to be annoying about it. He gloats when he beats you and goes quiet when he doesn't.

Beating Stormy consistently is the game's first real benchmark: it means you are forecasting better than the baseline, not just guessing well.

A Games tab with four daily games, free for everyone: High / Low, Radar Trace, Isobar and the Daily Quiz. They have their own badges, and they do not touch your Forecast Accuracy Rating or your leaderboard position.

Yes — head-to-head is a seven-day match. Each day is its own round, you each forecast your own city in your own windows, and whoever takes the most rounds takes the match. You never see each other's calls.

Three things worth knowing: you can send your first challenge once you have 30 days of play behind you — accepting one has no such wait, so a brand-new player can be challenged on day one — both players have to be in the same mode, and you can run up to three matches at once.

A Streak Freeze protects your streak on a window you miss. You start with none and earn them by playing — one for every seven days in a row, counting a day where you played either window.

A freeze covers one missed window, not a whole day. Miss just your morning and one freeze protects your morning streak. Sleep through both windows and two are used. But if you got a call in at all that day — either window, grace period included — the most you can lose is one.

A free account banks up to three. Premium raises the ceiling to nine and starts you with three. They are earned the same way at both tiers; Premium changes how many you can hold, not how you get them.

Real observations, never a forecast. Most values come from the automated National Weather Service stations at airports — the same ones the NWS uses to verify its own forecasts.

Rain and snow may be scored against a nearer CoCoRaHS gauge instead: volunteer observers with standard gauges, read each morning, and the gold standard for precipitation. Personal weather stations from the CWOP network fill in as a supporting source.

Your results screen names the station that scored you and how far away it is, every time.

Start with the station — your results screen names the one that scored you and gives its distance. Your call is compared against that station's actual reading, not against a forecast and not against the conditions your phone's weather app shows, which are usually interpolated for your exact spot rather than measured anywhere.

Rain and snow may have been scored against a nearby CoCoRaHS gauge rather than the airport. That is deliberate — it is normally the better number — and it can differ from what the airport recorded a few miles away.

If it still does not add up, email support@rivalwx.com with the date and your values and we will look it up.

A running average of how accurate your predictions have been. It updates after every scored window and shows on your profile, the leaderboards and in head-to-head. Consistency beats the occasional lucky guess — a strong FAR takes real forecasting skill and time.

Each mode has its own 20-rank ladder with its own names — the rank you hold in Casual is not the rank you hold in Expert. Casual climbs from The Drizzle to Eye of the Storm, Standard from The Forecast to The Authority, Expert from The Sounding to The Sovereign.

The harder the mode, the lower the accuracy needed to top its ladder — Casual's summit asks a 96 FAR, Standard's 84, Expert's 75 — because the modes are not scored on the same task.

Ranks recalibrate every Sunday morning from your past seven days. A strong week promotes you; a soft one can demote you. Rank cannot be bought, gifted or inherited.

Over 150, across eighteen categories — accuracy, streaks, progression, head-to-head, storm events for each of the three centers, the seasonal predictions, the mini-games, and a set that exists only during your first season of play.

Badges are recognition, not currency. None can be bought and none change your score.

Six boards, ranked by Forecast Accuracy Rating: your rivals, your city, your county, your state, national, and a combined national board that puts all three modes on one normalised scale. Storm Mode carries its own two — your area, and national.

Positions refresh every 15 minutes.

No. Every point in your rating is earned from your predictions. Premium opens more prediction categories and tighter scoring, but it does not improve your score on shared categories or give you any accuracy advantage over a free player.

What RivalWx becomes when the weather gets serious. When a severe weather outlook is issued for your area, Storm Mode opens a tiered prediction challenge tied to that event and tracks it from days out through the warnings themselves.

The closer the storm gets, the more specific — and harder — the calls become. You are forecasting risk level, storm type, hail size and wind speeds, then watching it verify against real storm reports.

The events are real, the data is real, and the stakes feel real.

Yes — three weather centers.

Storm Prediction Center (SPC) — severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, significant wind. Opens based on your forecasting location. Included free.

National Hurricane Center (NHC) — the Atlantic hurricane season. Every player can take part when a storm forms; players in its projected path get extra location-specific calls. A one-time $4.99 unlock.

Weather Prediction Center (WPC) — winter storms, extreme heat, heavy rain and flooding. Opens based on your location. A one-time $4.99 unlock.

The NHC and WPC unlocks are one-time purchases and are not part of a Premium subscription. Premium does not include them, and buying them does not require a subscription.

A tropical system is followed through three stages, and each is a prediction in its own right: the invest — a disturbance flagged but not yet named, and will it become a storm at all? — the named storm, and its local impact if it threatens land.

All three sit together on one card so you can see the whole arc, but they are scored separately and never merged into one number. An invest that fizzles out is still a real call and still scores: being right that nothing would come of it counts.

While a system is still live its entry rides on today rather than on the day the stage happened, so it stays where you can find it.

For SPC and WPC, Storm Mode opens on your forecasting location — no severe weather nearby, no Storm Mode, and your daily predictions run as usual.

Hurricanes are the exception: when a tropical system forms during the Atlantic season, every player with the NHC unlock can take part, wherever they are. Players in the projected path simply get extra calls the rest do not.

Once a season you call the season itself, not a day. There are five across the year: Spring Severe and Fall Severe from the Storm Prediction Center, the Atlantic hurricane season, and Summer and Winter from the Weather Prediction Center.

The questions are written for your own NWS forecast office, not for the country — northern Indiana is asked about northern Indiana's severe season, with answer bands drawn from that office's own fifteen-year history.

The submission window closes the day the season begins, and there is no grace period on it. Miss it and you sit that season out. Spring Severe takes calls through January and February; the hurricane season and Summer through April and May; Fall Severe through July and August; Winter through August and September.

You are scored once, when the season resolves, and seasonal results have their own leaderboard. The two Storm Prediction Center seasons are free; the hurricane season needs the NHC unlock and Summer and Winter need the WPC unlock — the same one-time purchases that open those centers in Storm Mode.

Stormy sits these out. Season-long forecasting is a different skill from a daily call.

Daily predictions, your Forecast Accuracy Rating, Casual and Standard modes, SPC Storm Mode, the two SPC seasonal predictions, all six leaderboards, head-to-head, the mini-games and the Stormy rivalry.

The core daily game and your rating are free and stay free.

$2.99 a month, or $19.99 a year. Expert mode with all 11 prediction categories, the SPC Day 2 and Day 3 prediction tiers, a streak-freeze ceiling of nine instead of three, and no ads.

Two honest notes. In Expert you start with 5 categories and open the other 6 as your accuracy climbs — they are earned, not withheld, but you will not have all eleven on day one. And Premium does not include the NHC or WPC unlocks; those are separate one-time purchases.

NHC (hurricane season) and WPC (winter storms, extreme heat, flooding) are $4.99 each, one time. You buy them once and they are yours. No subscription is required to buy them, no subscription includes them, and there is nothing to renew or cancel.

Yes. Reach Rank 5 in Standard mode and Expert opens for seven days, free, with all eleven categories unlocked. No card, nothing to cancel — when the week is up it closes again, and we tell you before it does.

It is earned rather than offered, which is the point: by Rank 5 you have shown you can forecast.

Not at launch — RivalWx is ad-free for every player when it ships. A free-tier ad experience is planned for a later update; when it arrives, Premium subscribers stay ad-free.

Any time. Subscriptions are managed through your Apple ID or Google Play account, the same place as all your other app subscriptions. Cancelling stops future charges immediately and you keep Premium to the end of the period you have paid for.

The NHC and WPC unlocks are one-time purchases — there is nothing to cancel.

Your email address for the account, your location (city, state and coordinates, to fetch weather data and place you on leaderboards), and usage and crash data to improve the app.

Four services handle specific jobs: PostHog for product analytics, Sentry for crash reporting, OneSignal for push notifications and RevenueCat for purchases. We do not collect photos, messages, contacts or any other personal content.

Full detail is in the Privacy Policy.

It is the game. Location finds the observing stations nearest you, assigns your predictions to the right observation point, places you on your city, county and state leaderboards, chooses which forecast office's questions you get for the seasonal predictions, and matches you to severe weather in your area.

If you would rather not share GPS, set your forecasting location by hand with a city and state. We do not keep a real-time trace of where you go — location is for gameplay, not advertising.

Sign in with Apple, sign in with Google, or an email address and password. You pick a display name during onboarding, and that is the only public-facing identifier on the leaderboards.

Yes, and it takes effect immediately: Settings → Delete Account in the app. That permanently erases your account and your prediction history, and it cannot be undone.

If you have an active Premium subscription, cancel it first under your Apple ID or Google Play account — deleting your RivalWx account does not cancel an auto-renewing subscription. The NHC and WPC unlocks are one-time purchases with nothing to cancel.

If you would rather we did it, email support@rivalwx.com with the subject line "Delete my account" and we will remove your data within 30 days, per the Privacy Policy.

At least 13. Players between 13 and 17 should have a parent or guardian read the Terms of Service first.

Email support@rivalwx.com with what happened and which phone and OS version you are on. If it is a scoring problem, include the date and the values you predicted — that makes it much faster to look up.

Email support@rivalwx.com. We read everything. We cannot promise a timeline or a reply to every message, but real feedback from players shapes what gets built.

Email info@rivalwx.com — the right address for press and professional enquiries. App information, screenshots and talking points available on request.

X @RivalWxApp · Facebook /RivalWx · Instagram @rivalwxapp · TikTok @rivalwxapp · YouTube @RivalWx