Think of it as “cloud” weather, going wherever you go. In other words, when you pull up the monitoring app, you’re actually talking to Netatmo’s servers, not the monitoring stations directly. The cylinders are the indoor/outdoor weather-monitoring stations themselves, running on batteries (the indoor station includes an AC adapter) and communicating with Netatmo’s servers through your wireless access point. and Europe) and two metallic, plastic-tipped cylinders - one taller than the other, about six inches versus four inches - that look a little like alien artifacts (or maybe something in which you’d place superhero-making serum). Inside, you’ll find mounting materials, international plug adapters (U.S., U.K. The kit itself comes in a fairly small box about the size of a small board game like Yahtzee or Boggle.

( MORE: Review: The Weather Channel’s Slick New (and Free) iPhone App) Netatmo’s calling it “urban” simply to indicate its value in areas where air quality may be of more concern.

Don’t be put off by the “urban” label, by the way - you can use it anywhere, whether you live in a city, a smaller town or, like my wife’s parents in northwest Iowa, the middle of nowhere.

It’s both an app for your iPhone, iPad or Android device (Netatmo says the Android version will be available in October), and an “urban weather station,” by which the company means actual weather monitoring hardware that sits both inside and outside your house to pass along information about temperature, humidity, air quality and more. So I was pretty stoked to try Netatmo’s $179 Weather Station when it crossed my desk. When my wife wakes in the morning - though I’ve added weather apps to her own computer - she just asks me for the forecast. Not enough to pursue it as a career, but let’s just say that, were you to poke around my computer, you’d find a small ecosystem of weather and radar utilities and widgets. Follow took a meteorology class in undergrad as an elective because I’ve always been into the weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos, ball lightning, supercells, squalls, you name it.

Netatmo wunderground