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IMHO weather icons really need color. This will be even more necessary when you want to have more subtle variations in conditions. Color - or shades of gray - could even be an indicator to the cloud type. A dark cloud with yellowish lightning is going to convey thunderstorms much faster and with less visual processing than anything you can possibly do in a mono-color icon.

This all leads to the question: Why use a single color?

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As a icon font, anything you want to do with it is via CSS. So they can be any color, have a shadow, etc, but unless someone wants to get clever, the icons have to be any single color.

I could make component pieces that have color CSS coded and stack, like a yellow sun on a white cloud that are positioned on top of one another, but that would be a massive undertaking I don't think I could commit to.

If you were to release this set as SVG, color would get a lot easier. It'd also open up the possibility of adding animation. For example: http://codepen.io/noahblon/details/lxukH

So someone made the wrong choice - font vs image.

It's a font, so single color. Multi-level (thus multi-color) fonts are possible, but are not heavily adopted.

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