If there's one thing Yahoo got right this year, it's the Yahoo Weather app. Yahoo made its weather application available to the Apple iPhone first, and followed it up with a separate app for Android devices and a powerful web version for mobile browsers. The app isn't necessarily the most feature-rich among the myriad weather apps available, but it is one of the most well-designed -- in fact, Apple gave the iPhone weather app from Yahoo a design award. Now Yahoo has finally brought its attractive weather application to the iPad.

One of the key features that makes Yahoo's weather application so enjoyable are the Flickr-sourced images. Yahoo culls the best outdoor shots from across Flickr to provide the animated backgrounds for its weather app. Yahoo goes so far as to encourage users to submit their own photos here. The images change constantly, in part to reflect the current weather conditions.

The iPad app boosts the number of animations and data to take full advantage of the extra real estate afforded by the larger screen. The first view users see is the current conditions (including temperature and precipitation), along with a small graphical summary of what the weather will be like over the next 24 hours, broken down into morning, afternoon, evening, and tomorrow categories. Want to see a more detailed forecast? Keep scrolling.

[Here are some more top-rated apps for your iPad or iPhone: 10 Best iOS Apps Of 2013.]

Below the current conditions summary, the app offers a detailed graph that shows what the weather will do over the next 24 hours. The graph charts the temperature, sky conditions (sunny, cloudy, etc.), and precipitation. Below the graph are the general conditions predicted for the next 10 days.

Users can drill down further for details such as humidity, visibility, UV index, and dew point. The app clearly illustrates precipitation forecasts using large water drops that are either X'ed out or partially filled depending on the chances of rain, sleet, or snow. It also uses a great animation to indicate sunrise and sunset, along with wind conditions and the phase of the moon. Finally, there's a map that provides details on temperatures, wind, precipitation, and satellite imagery in the surrounding area.

Yahoo added a new sharing feature that lets users connect with colleagues, friends, and family by sending the weather conditions and photo for any location via text, email, Twitter, or Facebook. This can be helpful for sending warnings or updates. The iPad app carries over the controls and settings tools from the iPhone and Android versions. Users can set up multiple locations, adjust behavior of alerts, and change between Celsius and Fahrenheit.

Yahoo Weather for iPad is free to download from the iTunes App Store here.

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