By Dheeraj Vurukuti, Sanjita Bhavirisetty and Lav Khot of Washington State University

Washington State University’s AgWeatherNet has launched a bilingual (English and Spanish) mobile app for iPhone and Android users. 

This free app supplements a recently launched website, improving the ease of data access on multiple platforms. AgWeatherNet gives growers instant access to localized weather conditions, temperature inversions, evapotranspiration, fruit surface temperature forecasting, spray guidance, air quality and heat awareness — and it does so more directly on smartphone devices. 

There are several key orchard management decisions that a regional weather forecast simply cannot support: whether it’s useful to mix air using wind machines to mitigate frost risk; if conditions are favorable for effective spray applications; does the smoky haze blowing in from a wildfire pose a risk to field crews; or when the fruit will experience heat stress even though the air temperature looks fine. All these decisions depend on localized, near-real-time weather data and forecasts from your nearest weather station. 

WSU’s AgWeatherNet has been capturing data from public-private stations across Washington — now over 550 — for years. AWN stations are regularly maintained and subject to quality assurance and control to ensure the data growers rely on is accurate. 

“Observations that once updated every 15 minutes now refresh every 5 minutes, putting near-real-time conditions at growers’ fingertips,” said Lav Khot, professor of precision agriculture and AgWeatherNet director. 

To complement station hardware updates, AgWeatherNet has launched a redesigned website and a mobile app that puts the localized weather and associated tools directly in your pocket, all free of charge. 

The AgWeatherNet app in practice 

“The home screen shows weather from nearest or favorite station, and one can swipe to get data from up to five saved favorite stations,” said Dheeraj Vurukuti, AWN developer who led the design and build of the AgWeatherNet mobile app from the ground up. 

This is useful if you’re managing blocks in more than one location or monitoring conditions from nearby stations that sit closer to a particular block. Each station view shows the same layout: the current reading for a grower-preferred parameter, such as temperature or air quality, a row of supporting weather data below it, and a tap-through to a detailed chart covering the past two days and next two days in one view. 

“If you don’t want to open the app at all, you don’t have to. The home screen widget sits on your phone’s lock screen and refreshes automatically in the background, with the current weather and key tools visible at the moment you pick up your phone,” said Sanjita Bhavirisetty, AWN systems analyst and application developer who co-developed the app and built the architecture of its backend systems. 

The app has a dashboard that is yours to configure. Reorder the cards, hide what’s not relevant to your operation (the cattle comfort index, perhaps?), switch between metric and imperial units, and set your preferred language. The app remembers your settings. 

The tools built into it 

The app’s value goes beyond weather observations. A set of decision-support tools previously available only on the web portal are now accessible directly in the app, each backed by real-time station data and forecasts to answer questions growers face throughout the season. 

—Temperature inversion: AWN stations are equipped with multiple temperature sensors at different heights to detect the presence, strength and timing of temperature inversions in near-real-time. The app displays inversion conditions for your nearest station, helping growers decide when it is most effective to run wind machines— protecting against frost by mixing warmer air that’s aloft down to the canopy level — and when conditions have returned to neutral. Historical inversion data is also available to help calibrate equipment at run times for your site. 

—Spray guidance: Using temperature, wind speed and direction, humidity and inversion condition data and forecasts from your nearest station, this tool returns one of three color-coded guidance scenarios: Spray, Spray with Caution, or Do Not Spray. 

—Air quality: AWN Mesonet tower stations, with 61 builds to date, report the air quality index, or AQI, readings directly in the app. During the active wildfire season, with smoky days more frequent across Eastern Washington in late summer months, the app gives growers and orchard managers localized, station-level data to supplement regional estimates. This matters when you’re making and adjusting orchard management and crew deployment decisions under Washington’s outdoor smoke exposure rules. 

—Worker heat awareness: The tool estimates heat stress risk using real-time and forecasted temperature, along with relative humidity data, and returns stress mitigation guidance developed in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center at the University of Washington. 

—Evapotranspiration: This app feature provides crop-specific ET estimates for apple, cherry, grape, blueberry, blackberry, potato, alfalfa and grass, drawn from station data, forecasts and agronomic formulas. 

—Fruit surface temperature: This feature estimates fruit surface temperature using models primarily developed and validated on Honeycrisp by WSU researchers. The estimates are color-coded using known risk thresholds for apple and grape, while blueberry models are in the works. Backed by station-specific, hourly forecasts for the next 10 days, this feature provides early warnings to proactively plan for resources needed to employ evaporative cooling, shade netting or canopy adjustments to protect the crop from heat stress. 

Additional AWN resources: Everything in one place 

The app’s resources tab is a single entry point to the broader AWN toolkit found
online, including: 

—AWN CropAI: Thermal-RGB imagery and AI-driven heat stress monitoring tool that helps growers assess risk and time their interventions during extreme weather events. 

—AWN CropAI-SWD: In-field detection and monitoring of spotted wing drosophila for cherry and berry operations. 

—AWN Web Portal: The full, bilingual web portal (weather.wsu.edu) with extended historical data, interactive maps, crop-specific models and alert configurations, accessible directly from the app. 

—AWN Smart Farms: This platform allows growers to connect to their privately deployed, block-level soil, plant and weather sensors and controllers to drive irrigation, frost and heat stress management through the AWN-managed web portal. 

Any new tool released by AWN will appear here automatically. 

What’s next 

AgWeatherNet is continuing to rebuild stations to expand network coverage. Now that the web platform and mobile app are launched, the AWN team plans to continue to solidify our offerings and to add new decision-support tools to meet the needs of stakeholders with input from the regional research community. If you’re using AWN and have a suggestion for future improvements, or find something missing, reach out via the app, by email or by submitting the feedback form online at: weather.wsu.edu. •

Dheeraj Vurukuti, Sanjita Bhavirisetty and Lav Khot work for Washington State University’s AgWeatherNet. You can reach the team by email at: weather@wsu.edu.