Weather data on an Apple iPhone.There are many websites that charge subscription fees for mobile users, such as Weathertap (weathertap.com); Garmin's My-Cast (www.digitalcyclone.com/products/mobile-my-cast), which can send you email alerts for severe weather; and SWIFT Mobile (www.swiftmobileweather.com), to name just a few. These sites primarily focus on land forecasts, with sparse marine information, if any.

SailFlow offers data designed for sailors.

SailFlow (www.sailflow.com) is a weather service designed for the needs of the sailor. You can sign up for their free service (which also includes a 30-day trial to their upgraded FX Membership) to obtain wind predictions from public weather stations and forecasts from the National Weather Service. For an additional monthly fee you can add information from SailFlow weather stations, view SailFlow meteorologist forecasts, and access the data in a format that is modified for your mobile phone.

Some of the navigation programs which we discussed in previous installments also include weather information for your smartphone. For an additional $9.99 you can add a weather radar companion program from Memory-Map. This will display live National Weather Service doppler radar images and animated loops for the U.S.. It works with Windows Mobile devices only. Our own ActiveCaptain will be adding weather markers later this year, which will display directly on nautical charts. Pathaway offers limited weather information through the third party site www.piohandler.com for an annual fee. TomTom Plus offers a variety of additional features, including weather. The weather portion is available for no additional charge.

The National Hurricane Center offers pages that are viewable by phone.WEATHER WHEN YOU NEED IT

At no time have we found access to accurate, timely weather forecasts more important than a few years ago when we were dodging Hurricane Isabel on our way south. We used a variety of sources including the National Hurricane Center (www.nhc.noaa.gov) and Hurricane Track (www.hurricanetrack.com). We particularly liked the Weather Channel, discussed above, as it had the most up-to-the-minute coverage. While it was possible to view their continuous coverage via satellite TV, that still required waiting through various stories until they were covering our area. Going to the website let us go directly to the information we needed.

The National Hurricane Center offers both text and imagery.The National Hurricane Center website offers an option for viewing the data on your smartphone. Simply select "Cell" on the left side of the home page. You can view a text forecast for hurricanes and tropical storms by geographic region, and even look at satellite images, all right on your smartphone. Hurricane Track is another good site for information. You can access basic information for free or subscribe to their premium services which include streaming video from storm cams, access to their message board and an email alert system for breaking weather news. They do not offer special formatting for your smartphone, which makes viewing a bit cumbersome.

As with any new tool, you will need to spend a little time with these weather sites on your smartphone. Each phone has slightly different screen specifications and features. Play around with the screen display tools for your phone to find the optimum options for viewing websites. Some sites offer accommodations for your smartphone and some do not. And, of course, some accommodations are better than others.

We suggest looking at each of these sites first on your PC to get a feel for what is available and what you might use. You may wish to create shortcuts on your smartphone, to go directly to the pages you use most often. As boaters we must manage trade-offs. You will quickly find the right trade-off between the large display on your PC, and the mobility and easy access of your smartphone.

NEXT WEEK: Tide and current predictions on a mobile phone.