Windy is great. The map is appealing, but be sure to check out the forecast view for a particular location. Also make sure you try different locations. I'm in the Salish Sea on Orcas Island in the San Juans and because we have a lot of topography here mixed with ocean, we have a lot of local effects, contour winds and so on and there are big differences between locations.
Also note that Windy can get it wrong. I grew up in Cape Town and forecasting there is easy compared to here because it's the tip of Africa surrounded by Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here it's very mixed with land, sea, big 11,000ft mountain ranges like the Olympics and so on and this region is hard to forecast. For where we are, the forecasts - and Windy's map specifically - is wrong fairly often.
A trick that a lot of folks don't know about is using ATIS, AWOS or ASOS at a local airport or airfield. If you want to know what the weather is at a given location, find a nearby airport, get their ATIS (or AWOS or ASOS) phone number and you can call and get a real-time report that is extremely accurate. I do this for KORS, our local airfield all the time. You can get this data off Foreflight although I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives. Obviously it's current weather, not forecast, but it's often helpful.
> , find a nearby airport, get their ATIS (or AWOS or ASOS) phone number and you can call and get a real-time report.
Obviously it's current weather, not forecast, but it's often helpful.
The US Government makes both METARs (current report) and TAFs (area forecast) available online. You can also get PIREPs (pilot reports) if you are interested in the conditions in the air.
I use an Android weather widget called Meteogram Pro. It supports pulling in and displaying METAR data, among a thousand other options.
You can make plots of things like thunderstorm probability, thickness and altitude of different cloud layers, azimuth and elevation for all planets in the solar system, pollen index, tide height, you name it.
By default, Windy uses the ECMWF weather model. You can also change it to GFS or ICON, which many american forecast websites use.
ECMWF, GFS and ICON are made by national/international forecasting agencies. IBM also has its own proprietary weather forecasting service, notably used by The Weather Channel. Other apps mostly use one of these models or aggregate predictions from different services (e.g. AccuWeather claims to aggregate many different models, including those from national agencies around the world)
"If you want to know what the weather is at a given location, find a nearby airport, get their ATIS (or AWOS or ASOS) phone number and you can call and get a real-time report that is extremely accurate."
You live in a beautiful area. I grew up scouting around there...on one trip we were invited to embark & leave Eastsound earlier than anticipated because a couple of our members decided to "casually" lift some cigars from a store there (IIRC). xD Thanks for the ATIS info too. I wonder if it's the same type of message I hear on non-noaa VHF from nearby.
Thanks - I'd forgotten about the marine VHF reports. Rarely listen to them, and I should. LOL! Trust me Orcas has plenty of scandal that's worse than that. I'm sure less than half the island has all your social security numbers memorized.
Another thing to consider is the difference between a global scale forecast mode (GFS, ECMWF) and a mesoscale model (HRRR, NAM, RAP). The later uses a much smaller grid size and can take into account terrain. In a place the the San Juan's (and the PNW in general), a lot of the weather patterns are coastal terrain driven so these models can be much more accurate. They catch is, they don't see out of far due to their higher computational complexity.
Here is a great resource to read up on the various models (there are far more than Windy offers): https://luckgrib.com/models/
1000% agree! I sail and Windy is great for an idea of what is going to happen, but no substitute for what is actually happening on the water, i.e., the fine-tuned weather that is necessary to sail a boat. If you want to know a hurricane is coming or the potential for a "weather event," then Windy is truly your friend. Otherwise, what the OP wrote is totally necessary. For sailing, you want to look at lighthouse weather data (e.g., NOAA) and the numerous buoy systems (e.g., https://buoybay.noaa.gov/) really are your friend.
I live less than 3 miles from an airport, but due to microclimates the weather is completely different. The NOAA does a reasonable job of forecasting my specific area, but most weather apps will take the current conditions from the airport, which can be off by over 10F in temperature alone.
Convective ("heat") thunderstorms are pretty much impossible to forecast precisely. On the day of, I'd recommend to use the radar, satellite and wind measurement, to get a picture what's happening, not the forecast anymore.
The forecasts for the US at forecast.weather.gov are really good too. I constantly refer to the hourly precipitation charts to figure out how much rain gear I should hike with, and their temperature predictions are useful too. Plus if they have any warnings or watches it’s helpful. It’s much better than any of the paid services out there.
Also worth mentioning that Windy provides several different forecast models that you can choose between. There are high resolution models like NAM, and lower resolution models like GFS - toggling between them often gives me a better sense of what to expect.
If you're in the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington/Western Washington, then UW's weather models reach much higher spatial resolution than Windy appears to do.
I live a couple islands over from you. As a frequent sailor, I use Windy regularly before a race, but it's never completely accurate (PredictWind tends to be better). Great for looking at general trends and visualizing patterns. This area is tricky — lots of microclimates for the reasons you mentioned and it's almost impossible for a service like Windy to be completely accurate.
The forecast that worked best for me (at least in summer in Europe) was local sailplane text forecast from the respective national service. It was an interpretation of the model by a very experienced human with a big picture introduction ("this front" or that "high pressure area") and also expressed uncertainties. They are sometimes behind soft paywalls, though (need to register, but its free. There are some weird rules of the EU about some weather data - cannot be freely available. I don't get it)
over the past few years my use of weather apps + forecasting has really been improved by reading alongside them the local NWS office's "area forecast discussion"which is published multiple times a day by the station's meteorologists: https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?new&wfo=...
It's really great to be able to contextualize the state of a Windy map, for example especially in Seattle where the weather patterns are tightly influenced by the Olympic mountains and other local conditions which these global maps usually fail to capture or express well.
Windy is impressive stuff but looking is half the battle with these maps, wind directions and "that weather blob is orange right now" only really go so far when your weather area's geography isn't simple; in fact, i think that the older static Weather Channel style maps which expressed the pressure gradients and fronts better and helped you build a model of what the weather is doing rather than which way the wind is blowing. (see https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/journeynorth.org/images/g... for an example)
Great to see some love for Forecast Discussions! As a pilot, and overall outdoor enthusiast I've relied on Forecast Discussions for many years. If I may be so bold, my app Deep Weather for iOS is designed to be the most convenient and easy-to-read source for Forecast Discussions. It's free (with some more advanced/optional features requiring a subscription): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/deep-weather/id528748182
nice app! I seem to have gotten myself stuck, though. In weather graphics I opened up day 4 fronts and now I can zoom around on it but there is no way to close it and the rest of the app is blocked!
Anyway, just a small bug report. Thanks for the app, useful enough to keep it installed!
Absolutely right about the forecast discussion. I generally refer to that first (and even check it regularly throughout the day for updates). It is a far better tool for understanding the stage of the weather.
Here's the same for the SF Bay area for those interested (took some poking around to find it, basically MTR is the monterey/bay area weather center so I tweaked the URL params to match)
Yup! And in general, you can click your location on https://www.weather.gov/ 's image map, and it'll redirect you to the local office URL which is the same 3 letter code: https://www.weather.gov/mtr/ and there is a link to the AFD in the "Text Product Selector" on the page!
Even before 2017, I recall reading here about... windy.tv(?) or some sort of odd extension. Shortcut has been in my toolbar, url updated 1 or 2 x's, since. A great resource when travelling by road looking to avoid high winds, rain, sleet & snow.
But, I'm curious if there are any apps or weather models that give probability distributions? Telling me that it is going to blow 10 mph is useful, but telling me, for example, that there is a 60% chance that there will be a 10 mph wind and a 40% chance that the wind will blow at 15 mph seems more in line with how I would naively assume weather forecasting works.
Right now, the ECMWF [0] model in Windy shows 6 mph winds gusting to 30 mph for my area (SE Alaska, with lots of mountains and fiords, so a area that is gusty and hard to predict by nature). It almost feels like they're throwing their hands up in the air and admitting that they have no idea what the wind will actually do today. Which, is fine, if that's the case.
I just wish consumer weather forecasts did a better job communicating probabilities and uncertainties instead of spitting out a single value.
ECMWF makes probabilistic forecasts, in the form of an ensemble of 50 IID examples. So this is mostly matter of Windy figuring out how to put that information into their UI.
Thanks for the reply. It sounds like you have a much better grasp of these things than I do.
So, when clients like windy forecast "10 knots east gusting to 20" for ECMWF, do you know if those numbers are directly copied and pasted from the ECMWF model, or do clients take the probabilistic forecast model and make some sort of average prediction that they display?
I'm very interested in how clients like windy go from a probibilistic forecast model to a singular hard number. Unless this is something built-in to ECMWF itself.
Windy does allow switching between different models, which can be helpful to roughly gauge probability. Definitely not perfect though. And some of the models are consistently inaccurate for specific locations in certain conditions in my experience.
If you click on a specific location, at the bottom you can expand the forecast. Instead of "Basic" select "Wind" which will let you see multiple model forecasts. Not exactly a probability but you can do some mental ensembling to see if models agree or not.
They have been my preferred weather source for a few years now. Forecasting is spotty in my area, but they have a feature where you can quickly compare 4 weather models, which tends to give a good overview. They also have my favorite android widget.
My journey with weather mapping sites went in reverse order from this thread: Years ago when I ran a local weather blog I discovered the Nullschool site, then a few years later VentuSky, then Windy. I don't do the blog anymore but I still rely on Windy for visualizing weather conditions.
There's also https://www.predictwind.com/ which is a (very expensive) commercial service a lot of boat/yacht folks use for planning. I believe they also have some utilities for delivering compressed forecast data over satellite link as well.
They will sell you an irridium go and distribute data through their own email client but you can get all of that through Sailmail and using the saildocs email GRIB service for less money with a lot more flexibility, also I’m not sure how good their support is for using something like PACTOR over HF which if you are a licensed HAM is always free.
This stuff really only applies to offshore or other low bandwidth connection use cases. When I have decent cell/internet it’s hard to beat windy’s UI.
It's been "*Experimental*" for several years, and the site looks kind of dated, but it provides a useful visualization of radar, satellite, tropical storms, etc, plus it runs on my old PC! =)
I also like the NWS Hourly Graph to give a better idea of for example when it's going to start or stop raining or go below freezing on a given day.
You may be interested in era5 data for historical reanalysis. This is published by the ECMWF and is available for free. I’m pretty sure it has solar irradiance data but I’m not certain. You can also get NCAR reanalysis and other model reanalysis products through the NWS[2].
For visualizing gridded data products you can use panoply[3]. If you just care about GRIBS zyGrib works pretty well too.
There is a startup in Norway called Glint Solar that may help. They serve the floating solar industry with geospatial tools and data, both on reservoirs and offshore. If you can expand a bit on your questions, there may be more resources to point to.
Readit News
Also note that Windy can get it wrong. I grew up in Cape Town and forecasting there is easy compared to here because it's the tip of Africa surrounded by Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here it's very mixed with land, sea, big 11,000ft mountain ranges like the Olympics and so on and this region is hard to forecast. For where we are, the forecasts - and Windy's map specifically - is wrong fairly often.
A trick that a lot of folks don't know about is using ATIS, AWOS or ASOS at a local airport or airfield. If you want to know what the weather is at a given location, find a nearby airport, get their ATIS (or AWOS or ASOS) phone number and you can call and get a real-time report that is extremely accurate. I do this for KORS, our local airfield all the time. You can get this data off Foreflight although I'm sure there are plenty of free alternatives. Obviously it's current weather, not forecast, but it's often helpful.
The US Government makes both METARs (current report) and TAFs (area forecast) available online. You can also get PIREPs (pilot reports) if you are interested in the conditions in the air.
https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver
You can make plots of things like thunderstorm probability, thickness and altitude of different cloud layers, azimuth and elevation for all planets in the solar system, pollen index, tide height, you name it.
It's unclear to me if Windy is doing much more than creating a great presentation of existing data. Their website does list an open ML role, though..
I wonder how much rolling your own weather forecast is tantamount to rolling your own crypto??
ECMWF, GFS and ICON are made by national/international forecasting agencies. IBM also has its own proprietary weather forecasting service, notably used by The Weather Channel. Other apps mostly use one of these models or aggregate predictions from different services (e.g. AccuWeather claims to aggregate many different models, including those from national agencies around the world)
Equally dangerous, but not designed to be private and a huge different set of risks.
To get the phone number:
For example, Orcas Island or, without the redirecthttps://www.aviationweather.gov/metar/data?ids=KSEA&format=d...
Here is a great resource to read up on the various models (there are far more than Windy offers): https://luckgrib.com/models/
I kind of lost trust in it, when I was in the middle of a thunderstorm, yet windy showed me all sunny.
Granted, it was in the alps and forcasting there is hard, but it was the current state of things they got wrong.
https://a.atmos.washington.edu/mm5rt/
I recommend starting with the 4km or 1.3km WRF-GFS model and looking at something like 3hr Precip.
https://windy.app/features/hrrr-weather-forecast-model.html
Other models:
https://windy.app/guide/windy-app-weather-forecast-models.ht...
I don't like the zooming ratio
It's really great to be able to contextualize the state of a Windy map, for example especially in Seattle where the weather patterns are tightly influenced by the Olympic mountains and other local conditions which these global maps usually fail to capture or express well.
Windy is impressive stuff but looking is half the battle with these maps, wind directions and "that weather blob is orange right now" only really go so far when your weather area's geography isn't simple; in fact, i think that the older static Weather Channel style maps which expressed the pressure gradients and fronts better and helped you build a model of what the weather is doing rather than which way the wind is blowing. (see https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/journeynorth.org/images/g... for an example)
I find apps that use that kind of marketing to make it sound like they are associated with the big agency they yank the data from to be really sleazy.
Anyway, just a small bug report. Thanks for the app, useful enough to keep it installed!
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The other favorite of mine is the HRRR high-res models. You can see a simulated radar map for the next 48 hours: https://mag.ncep.noaa.gov/model-guidance-model-parameter.php...
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?new&wfo=...
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Live View of Hurricane Laura - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24289287 - Aug 2020 (54 comments)
About Windy (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21701065 - Dec 2019 (34 comments)
Typhoon Lands in Japan – Windy Storm-Tracking Platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21232332 - Oct 2019 (44 comments)
How wind and geography influences wildfire smoke - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18416850 - Nov 2018 (6 comments)
Windy.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094639 - Aug 2017 (103 comments)
But, I'm curious if there are any apps or weather models that give probability distributions? Telling me that it is going to blow 10 mph is useful, but telling me, for example, that there is a 60% chance that there will be a 10 mph wind and a 40% chance that the wind will blow at 15 mph seems more in line with how I would naively assume weather forecasting works.
Right now, the ECMWF [0] model in Windy shows 6 mph winds gusting to 30 mph for my area (SE Alaska, with lots of mountains and fiords, so a area that is gusty and hard to predict by nature). It almost feels like they're throwing their hands up in the air and admitting that they have no idea what the wind will actually do today. Which, is fine, if that's the case.
I just wish consumer weather forecasts did a better job communicating probabilities and uncertainties instead of spitting out a single value.
[0] https://www.ecmwf.int/
So, when clients like windy forecast "10 knots east gusting to 20" for ECMWF, do you know if those numbers are directly copied and pasted from the ECMWF model, or do clients take the probabilistic forecast model and make some sort of average prediction that they display?
I'm very interested in how clients like windy go from a probibilistic forecast model to a singular hard number. Unless this is something built-in to ECMWF itself.
https://imgur.com/a/UezBGqZ
meteoblue.com offers 18 models if you click on 'MultiModel'. I found them to be very reliable.
windy.com is cool though, respect to the Czech founder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D
Their premium tier is for automatic routing and can get expensive for budget sailors.
This stuff really only applies to offshore or other low bandwidth connection use cases. When I have decent cell/internet it’s hard to beat windy’s UI.
What's the difference?
My primary visual weather site is the National Weather Service Enhanced Data Display.
https://preview.weather.gov/edd
It's been "*Experimental*" for several years, and the site looks kind of dated, but it provides a useful visualization of radar, satellite, tropical storms, etc, plus it runs on my old PC! =)
I also like the NWS Hourly Graph to give a better idea of for example when it's going to start or stop raining or go below freezing on a given day.
This is the forecast page for my area:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=43.7445&lon=-7...
Put in your own zip code, or type in town and state (sorry, just US). Then click "Hourly Weather Forecast" below the daily descriptions to get this:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=43.7445&lon=-7...
There's no location picker on that page though.
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Are there raw historic datasets or nice visualization for solar irradiation including over seas and oceans ?
For visualizing gridded data products you can use panoply[3]. If you just care about GRIBS zyGrib works pretty well too.
[1]https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datas... [2]https://www.ready.noaa.gov/archives.php [3]https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/
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