New Yahoo! weather app powered by Flickr makes bad weather look great!

Earli­er today Yahoo! launched a new iOS weath­er app that takes advant­age of the power of the crowd through a cool Flickr group; Pro­ject Weath­er.

The com­pany line:

Today, we’re shar­ing the Yahoo! Weath­er App for iPhone, iPod and iPod touch – a win­dow into the places you care about. We’ve brought togeth­er beau­ti­ful images from our Flickr com­munity to show you cur­rent loc­al con­di­tions, with all the details you want to know about the fore­cast. Instead of read­ing the weath­er, you can SEE the weather.

The neat thing is, any­one can con­trib­ute images to the Flickr group that appears in the back­ground of the app by con­trib­ut­ing to the open Pro­ject Weath­er group.

Our goal is to have amaz­ing pho­tos for every weath­er con­di­tion that cov­er the globe — morn­ing, after­noon, and night — across every city in the world, and we want your help. Wheth­er you’re simply a day­dream­er or an avid pho­to­graph­er, sub­mit pho­tos of your favor­ite places to our Flickr Group and your image can be seen by tens of mil­lions in Yahoo! Weath­er for iPhone. For more details, please go to Pro­ject Weather’s page on Flickr.

To my mind it looks like there’s anoth­er goal here too; to get more people using Flickr to com­pete with the instant weath­er shots on ser­vices like Ins­tagram, and grow the pho­to­grapher­’s audi­ence and reach with (poten­tially) more exposure.

As you can see from my screen­shot above, it’s a very clean and nicely designed app, with a look that takes advant­age of the great ret­ina dis­play on the new­est gen­er­a­tion iPhones.

Yeah, I’m try­ing it. Below is my shot for Cloudy Edmon­ton — we’ll see if it makes the cut and is accep­ted into the group 😉

And yeah, they’ve even provided a movie that gives more detail.