104 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread
I wrote in their forums suggesting they add air quality/pollution info and greenhouse gas emissions to their maps and it was done in about three days. I was impressed.

Btw I think they use Riot.js on their front end?

They do use Riot, there was a blog post somewhere about it a bit ago.
What model is this pulling from?
Not sure, but there's a "forecast model" radio button in the bottom-right of the interface which you can play around with.
This site/app is my favorite because you can compare three models side by side: gfs, ecmwf and nems.
Not sure why they even bother pulling gfs, its miles behind the euro.
That is pretty cool! Although hijacking the back button is a bit annoying.
Looks like that isn't purposeful, it adds coordinates as a parameter after you load the page and hitting back takes you "back" to the plain homepage.
They should be using replaceState instead of pushState there. An all-too-common mistake.
They hijack a lot of standard buttons. I couldn't command-L to focus into the address bar. I have a special disdain for this trend.
Huh, Cmd-L works for me (Safari, latest version of Sierra)
It's called history API, and it's not annoying, they should use more .replaceState though
We check it, this seems like bug
It's the JavaScript framework that does this. Like the commenter said, you have to replace path for every view instead of push
It works really well on mobile! Including the hijacking the back swipe feature.
He we would like to fix this bug. Can you get in touch with us on community.windy.com > Feedback
Thanks for correctly saying "these data" in the menu
This looks incredibly similar to https://www.ventusky.com/ doesn't it?
A bit of post hint.fm streamline history:

It can be sourced back to Cameron Beccario's project getting some exposure in late 2013 after launch as open source. https://github.com/cambecc/earth

It's cited as direct motivation by windy: https://community.windy.com/topic/4/about-windy

---

For the record: windy, launched as windity in late 2014, this was 1 1/2 years before ventusky:

"ventusky is owned by InMeteo, built to compete with windyty, which was originally a copy of my site's open source repo"

"if you're curious: http://hint.fm/wind launched Mar? 2012, e.n.n Dec 2013, windyty Nov 2014, and ventusky Jul 2016"

https://twitter.com/cambecc/status/784448346471530496

---

I also recommend his talks at "The Graphical Web" 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNODLWhSbw

and openvis 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSmNZm1e0k

Except this one immediately runs

Does that thing where you hit back and it cancels the loading scripts and site actually runs

Not sure where the data is coming from but my area is showing arrows to the north west. We nearly never get wind from the south east and looking outside this map isn't accurate.
Looking at this made me realize how insanely huge storms are in the southern ocean. Hurricanes and typhoons up north have nothing on that.
Interesting. Does anybody know why it happens?
There is a continuous ring of ocean the whole way around Antarctica. That water can build up a lot of momentum as it is pulled around the Earth by tidal forces. At least, that's what the captain told me, I'm sure there are meteorologists around here with a much deeper understanding.
Which also raises the question about how the map projection / scaling affecs the percieved size and data layout.
That's the so-called "Roaring Forties":

"The Roaring Forties are strong westerly winds found in the Southern Hemisphere, generally between the latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees."

FWIW, I found hang gliders really enjoying this site (alongside some other obscure wind estimation sites) for planning whether to go flying.
Great website, has been around for some years as windity and windytv. I guess windy will be its final name. I usually find windguru.cz more easy to read, but windy offers a cool visualization that I think gives more context. It's really cool to check it during hurricanes.
Windy was coded by billionaire founder and owner of Seznam, which is czech search engine (and media company), one of only three other search engines in the world that still beats Google in local market.
The other two being Yahoo Japan and baidu?
Also Yandex (Russia)
Has he actually coded it himself? Do you have more information?

Seznam is a remarkable company. Their maps (http://mapy.cz) are second to none, my favourite feature are touristic maps which work at least within Europe.

Yeah, it was a side project he made for himself as he is a pilot and windsurfer. [1]

Though for windsurfing I find windguru.cz is more useful (also Czech(!)) and for flying its hard to beat ForeFlight.

It should also be clarified that Seznam is one of the few companies to beat Google in searches with the Latin alphabet. Local search engines are still beating Google in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Cyrillic alphabets.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinternational/2017/02/06/...

As far what I know (I read an article about him and this project in Forbes Czech), he works on this project personally with only a few other developers. Originally he made it for himself because as a hobby pilot he needs an accurate weather forecast.
Wow. Mapy.cz is amazing. Just checked my German town. Not only more information than Google, it's way faster. Everything feels instant.
It seems to be based on OpenStreetMap (I recognise some changes I made), which is indeed a lot more detailed than Google Maps in some areas.
It is, see the copyright in the bottom-left corner.
Yeah, OMS is consistently better than Google in Germany (or at least where I looked), but this site still feels better.
(comment deleted)
Why only 3? I can list: Baidu, Naver, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, Seznam
Well, it seems there more, I dont remember by which measure it was three. I had Seznam, Baidu and Yandex in mind.
In case others are wondering: Speed is shown in kt which means "knot," equal to one nautical mile per hour, approximately 1.151 mph.
Yeah, I'm a little up and to the left of that (a couple hundred miles inland.)

While the big spinning mass offshore is the headline, the subtitle is that everything east of I-35 is going to get somewhere between a foot and two feet of rain. Not snow, water.

This is pretty, but I don't think it is going to be 35 C in the North Atlantic any time soon.
You know what strikes me? Look at the overland place where the winds move quickly. Those are our cities. We're living off whiffs in the aerodynamic backwaters on a world of windy metropoli.
Holy hell please give me my back button back.
Yeah browser push state for days
My friend that works in the aerospace industry uses Windy all the time.
It reminded me of this awesome project: https://earth.nullschool.net/
well that would be the first major hurricane to strike the US in over ten years. hopefully people aren't too complacent and still take them seriously.

I would hope FEMA does better this time but recent track record of that agency still is not good.

We are happy that you like windy.com. If you want to help us with this project, then report all issues to community.windy.com We love bug reports from programmers, with all screenshots etc (Ivo)
Oh shit what's going on by Texas
Hurricane Harvey
Crazy, people's lives being ripped out by strong winds and I just see some swirls on a screen.
Is it just me or is this website really slow?

(Especially after pressing the "play" button in the lower left).

It was fast for me on my iPhone