The other day we posted about how you can find and use ArcGIS Explorer add-ins from ArcGIS Explorer Labs. Last night the weather was bit crazy in Redlands with high winds. And on the news this morning were reports about a big storm hitting Denver. So we decided we'd take a closer look at one of the add-in in Labs - the Weather Forecast add-in which uses weather services from Weather4Webs.com and a placefinder service from geonames.org. This unsupported sample was built by Dara Burlo, one of the ArcGIS Explorer product engineers.

First, as described in the earlier post, go to the Labs group and grab the Weather Forecast add-in. After you add it you'll see something like this on your add-ins tab:

Click the add-in, and you'll see a dialog open. Use the button to click on the map.

Under the hood the coordinate location is obtained via the mouse click, and using the geonames API the nearest city is found. You'll see the city name displayed (above we clicked in Redlands, CA).

Then choose from 1 to 7 day forecasts (the default is a 5 day forecast) and click Find Forecast. The city name is passed to weather4webs, which returns the desired forecast for the location you pointed to.