If you like your weather reports to be delivered to you directly on your desktop you may be really like how Microsoft is handling that in its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. The Metro startpage that you see when you boot into the system displays a weather app among other apps right on that page.

Chance is you are currently using a previous version of Windows, and for those systems, the official Weather Channel app may be what you have been looking for. All you need to do is install the application on your system, set a location that you want to receive weather information of.

The information are then automatically displayed in the application window next to quite a bit of ads which may be irritating at first. You see the current temperature and weather condition on the screen, as well as weather related information on top of that including sunrise and sundset information, humidty, wind speed and direction, and several other weather related information.

Below that you find news, usually in video form that you can play provided that you have Adobe’s Flash Player installed on the system.

At the bottom you find a list of buttons that you can click on to display additional information. This includes a five day weather forecast, weather maps by Microsoft Bing, a larger list of videos that include news, forecasts, on tv and featured videos, and an in season button that is providing information about pollen, cold and flue and beauty. (e.g. dry skin alerts, frizz alerts).

You can use the options to switch between Fahrenheit and Celsius, switch themes and configure auto start and alert sounds.

The Weather Channel App for Windows is all in all a pretty sophisticated program that provides you with detailed weather information. It is a bit heavy on the ad side of things though, especially since the ads are changed frequently and automatically in the program.