The Weather Channel Interactive today announced its highly anticipated weather application for iPhone and iPod touch is available on the Apple App Store. The new application gives users the ability to personalize their maps with the weather layers and neighborhood landmarks that are relevant to their daily routine. This would enable a parent to add radar and cloud layers to their local map, identify a local park, and then track the weather prior to a little league game or school picnic.

“Customers expect much more than the weather – they want personalized weather information that is accessible anytime, anywhere, and in a highly interactive way,” said Louis Gump, VP of Mobile for The Weather Channel Interactive. “The revolutionary iPhone and iPod touch devices have given us the opportunity to deliver an application that customers will find indispensable, whether they are running to catch a plane, train or tee time.”

The new application seamlessly integrates with the iPhone and iPod touch address book so users can share weather conditions and alerts via e-mail. For example, users can forward severe weather alerts to friends and family who may not be aware of approaching weather, or a local forecast to their tennis team to let them know of a possible change in plans.

Additional features include:

Location-enabled – Find Me feature plots user’s exact location for quick, accurate conditions and severe weather alerts
Fully Customizable Maps – Users decide which weather layers to display (including radar, clouds, rainfall, snowfall, UV index, etc.), as well as what landmarks to display (surrounding cities, schools, parks, etc.)
Nicknamed Locations – Ability to store and personalize relevant locations for fast and easy access (i.e. Grandma’s House, John’s School)
Share Information – Users can share weather conditions and alerts with contacts in their address book
Video forecasts – Local, national and international video forecasts with The Weather Channel on-air meteorologists.
The new weather application for iPhone and iPod touch also features patented technology from The Weather Channel that provides detailed weather conditions, accurate up to 2 kilometers. This is particularly useful for areas where conditions like wind and temperature can vary greatly over a short distance. This technology combines traditional weather observations with even more data to provide unique conditions for more than 1.9 million locations – literally filling in the gaps of the reporting systems used by other providers.

Additionally, The Weather Channel Mobile offers other iPhone application developers the ability to tap into The Weather Channel application on a local level. This functionality, available for the first time from The Weather Channel, will enable any iPhone or iPod touch application to use the OpenURL standard to launch The Weather Channel application and provide the end user with appropriate weather information.

The Weather Channel Mobile app is available from Apple‘s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at http://www.apple.com/iphone/appstore/.