Weather Widget - Data from another city and wind speed and direction issues

I’m with you, same issue. I rely heavily on the wind for surfing and fishing activities. Would be keen to hear about any solutions. Bought this watch and downloaded the app yesterday. From what I can see, this issue should have been resolved with the updated version of the app. 

Instinct gets the weather data over GC Mobile from the phone OS's weather data service, so you may want to check out the settings of that service in your Android or iOS settings. Sometimes people have it set to a fixed location, or have the localization turned off, or do not have mobile data enabled for it, or the update interval is set too high.

Edit: please note that the weather service is not necessarily the same app used on the widget you may have on the screen. You can get to the weather service through the phone system settings.

This is incorrect. The weather information obtained is from different weather stations around your area, in relation to the cell towers that you’re near (through GCM).

It would be nice for it to be linked to the Weather Application of choice but it’s not.

Odie21 said:

This is incorrect.

This is what Garmin support pages tell, and as far as I could verify it indeed does use the system weather service. It, of course, does not mean that the watch displays always the identical values as your phone widget, since the system calls are often scheduled differently, hence they may each display data from another time point. Also, a I wrote, the OS weather data service is not necessarily the same one that your phone's weather widget uses, hence it can show different data. Phone's weather widgets are often customized by the manufacturer, or the user. System weather service is not necessarily the same app.

You may also want to check the following tips from Garmin Support, if not receving weather updates :
The Weather Widget Is Not Displaying Weather Information on My Fitness Device

Odie21 said:

It would be nice for it to be linked to the Weather Application of choice but it’s not.

You can install a weather app and have it sending the forecasts to your watch through notifications. Not with all weather app you can customize the notifications equally, but if I remember well, for example 1Weather app has a quite wide choice of notification settings.

The Weather information is obtained based on your phones location and has NOTHING to do with the Applications on your phone. 

If you’d like to refer people to the link you provided, then you can scroll down to “I am seeing weather data, but it seems to be incorrect”:

It specifically states:

• General location data is usually provided by your phone (within several mi/km accuracy) when the Garmin device requests weather data from the app.
  • Example: Nearby airports are often the closest source for weather data, and weather conditions there may be different from your actual location.

NOTE: This weather data source is automatically selected and cannot be manually changed. This data may not match other weather apps on your phone as other apps may use different sources for weather data.

It would be nice if Garmin from the beginning could be more forthcoming with this information but they’re not. I researched this extensively a few years ago.

Odie21 said:

The Weather information is obtained based on your phones location and has NOTHING to do with the Applications on your phone.

This is also what I wrote. And also the reason for what I linked the support document explaining it.

So, I have to repeat, that GC Mobile uses the system weather data libraries, which may be different on iOS, as well as on diverse Android versions, OEM clones, and localizations.

In my case (a Samsung phone), the system weather library is in the package com.sec.android.daemonapp:com.samsung.android.weather, and more specifically GC Mobile uses the android activity com.samsung.android.weather.app.particulars.ParticularsActivity. It then also polls the packages com.accurate.live.weather.forecast.pro and com.weather.Weather, but those are most probably linked directly from the initial package com.samsung.android.weather. In other words, the weather data source is clearly platform depending. And it also confirms what Garmin developers posted earlier here on the forum. Personally, to verify it, I pulled this information directly from the phone communication and logs, using developer tools.

So, unlike with marine navigation devices from Garmin, using the inReach technology, which then relies on the weather API of DarkSky.net for terrestrial locations, fitness devices (over GCM) use weather data providers native to the platform of the phone, hence Garmin likely does not even know which one it is, in each respective case. They apparently do not use their own weather data source.

And this is also the reason why I wrote that it may be possible to influence the way the data from the system weather service is being served to GCM. If you adjust the settings of the system weather application, it may influence also the data served to GCM by the system library. And also may not - it all depends on the specific platform, again.

... and as I wrote, you can bypass the weather widget entirely, and sending the weather reports to the watch through system notifications (not using the built-in weather widget). This will allow you to tune up the content, frequency, and location as much as you like, and as much as the respective weather app allows. As I wrote, for example the 1Weather app is pretty flexible in the way you can configure system notifications, that you can then receive on the watch.