Working the land is its own kind of weather-watching. Our dedicated Farming & Planting Weather Guide adds a live frost and soil-temperature check for your location, a traditional moon-planting calendar showing the best time to sow leafy crops, fruiting crops and roots, and practical guidance on reading the weather for planting, spraying and harvest.

Every activity is scored from the same live weather data, but each one weighs the conditions differently — and that is the whole point. A brisk, gusty day that would earn a poor score for boating, where wind and waves are the dominant safety concern, might barely dent the score for running, where a bit of wind is no great obstacle. By tailoring the weighting to what actually matters for each activity, the scores tell you something genuinely useful rather than just repeating the same forecast under different labels.

The scores are built on real, published guidance rather than guesswork. Boating is scored against the wind thresholds behind marine small-craft advisories, the point at which conditions become hazardous for smaller vessels. Crop spraying uses the agricultural standard that the ideal wind for minimising spray drift is a light, steady breeze of roughly five to sixteen kilometres per hour — and, importantly, it penalises dead-calm conditions too, because still, clear, dry air signals a temperature inversion that can carry spray drift unpredictably far. Running and other strenuous activities weigh the feels-like temperature and humidity heavily, because heat stress is the real limiting factor. Each activity, in other words, encodes a little bit of genuine domain knowledge about the weather that matters for it.

A score above 85 means excellent conditions; 68 to 84 is good; 50 to 67 is fair; 30 to 49 is poor; and below 30 means conditions are genuinely unsuitable. Alongside the number, each activity shows the individual factors driving it — wind, rain, temperature and so on — so you can see not just how good the day is, but exactly what is helping or hurting. A boating score of 55 tells you more when you can see that it is the gusts, not the rain, pulling it down.