Epic Ride Weather

Our favorite weather app integrates with your Ride with GPS Library to generate hyper-localized forecasts based on the actual routes and timing of your intended ride.
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It pays to know before you go
It has been said there is no such thing as bad weather, only improper gear. While the adage holds true to a certain extent, your ability to plan and choose the right gear is still only as good as your weather forecast. Few things impact the cycling experience as universally as weather, determining where, when and how we ride, essential gear and bike setups we choose.

Dynamic Forecasting

Weather forecasting for cycling can feel like a bit of a dark art aimed at a moving target. Your rides are inherently dynamic with topography and conditions evolving over the course of the day. As such Epic Ride Weather has developed a novel approach to forecasting using the coordinates of your plotted Ride with GPS route and timeline to generate highly individualized projections modeled on the specifics of your ride. Amazing, right?
The tricky part up to this point has been that conventional weather apps only tell part of the story, taking readings from fixed positions in city centers or airport codes. In many cases this predicts weather near or adjacent to where you’ll be riding, but isn’t particularly helpful over the course of your entire route, especially in mountainous or backcountry areas where micro-climates and conditions can swing the widest.

Hyper-Localized Metrics

This ingenious third-party utility, created by developer David Green, integrates with your activity and route library in the Ride with GPS mobile app, allowing you to select any of your recorded rides or planned routes (including pinned and club routes), plug in custom start times and average riding speeds to generate individualized forecasts based around all the particulars of your actual ride. The resulting forecasts are graphically rendered to feature temperature, precipitation, cloud cover, wind direction and speed, elevation, daylight and UV index metrics. Forecasts also happen to be instantly sharable via text and the standard array of share menu options on your phone, keeping your ride mates in the loop with the best and latest information.

How It Works

It’s actually pretty simple. By pulling your course data from Ride with GPS, Epic Ride Weather generates a series of micro-forecasts for every ten minutes of your ride using the actual GPS coordinates of your trackline, factoring in elevation, time and average pace. Because it relies on Dark Sky's precise weather modeling software, Epic Ride Weather’s forecast resolution is unusually specific - to the minute and at precise intervals along your plotted course. As some may be aware, Dark Sky was recently integrated into Apple Weather (the native weather app on your iPhone) but is effectively an enhanced version of the same technology, most of Dark Sky’s features simply rolled into Apple Weather.
Developer David Green adds "True to their Dark Sky roots, Apple Weather uses 'high-resolution meteorological models combined with machine learning and prediction algorithms'. They’ve made many improvements including changes to their weather model. In practice I’ve found that these forecasts are even better than those provided by Dark Sky. Epic Ride Weather will rely on Apple Weather in 2023 and beyond."
Long-term forecasts are calculated by modeling physics of the atmosphere. It takes about 3-4 hours to do those calculations, so when you get a conventional forecast, weather station data used to produce these is already a minimum of 3 hours old. Improving on this, Epic Ride Weather incorporates satellite image-based forecasting, using AI to predict near-term conditions. This approach makes forecasts for the next 6 hours much more precise.

Best Practices

The closer to the ride or race start that you generate your forecast, the better the information will be. Forecasts are best taken a week out, a few days before, the night before, then within an hour of the start time. Forecasting frequently like this will help you to shape your planning and tactics as your ride or race approaches. This will be particularly relevant for wind direction and precipitation.
Forecasts are shareable via text, email, airdrop and other share menu options using the share icon located in the upper right corner of the Epic Ride Weather app. When planning trips in distant locales, your forecasts will automatically be set to local times zones of the associated routes. For additional help getting Epic Ride Weather set up and configured, visit our help page.


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