They are running an impressive show all around, check out their webcam embeds and API, great for spotting fires and things, plus they have their own online community forum. Their mobile app is really good too, includes offline map capabilities, and I take it on hikes for tracking.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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
Yes I'm sorry, Area Forecast Discussions are a product of NOAA/National Weather Service in the United States and its territories. They do cover a lot of ground from Guam to Puerto Rico, the continental US and Alaska, but not Europe.
That’s not really a reason to restrict its installation to users that have a US iCloud account only. People travel, move, or have interests in other areas than their home country.
I don’t see the problem - I didn’t read it as “we have NOAA experts working for us” but as “we are sharing data from the experts at…”. I think sleazy is… unkind - especially reaching that conclusion from just one line in a description.
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!
I use it for surf forecasting. When you click on "waves" icon, the menu extends and there is an icon for a surfer. Click the surfer and not only do you get a different "heat" map but wherever you click will give you the swell for that location.
I've been using Windy to keep an eye on Hurricane Larry and my friends and relatives in St. John's, Newfoundland. Looks like they're about to be clobbered in a few hours.
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.
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.
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.
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)
for people who live in europe, try AROME, it's very limited compared to the other models, but it does (IMO) give the best forecast.
in my experience AROME tends to forecast on the drier side of the weather. Since I'm in the UK I use AROME first and flick between ECMWF. (ECMWF tends to forecast on the wetter side!!)
for the next hour(s) forcast, I tend to use rain radar - windy has this, but it's not the best I use netweather.tv (there's many others though)
I'll add in a vote for the UK Met Office here too (particularly for the UK). AROME is a high resolution 'nested' model, where the region of interest is simulated at a higher resolution that the (often global) driving model. Similar to ICON-D2 (Germany [0])and UKV (UK [1]). These will typically produce a better downscale of the forecast to a local area.
Their utility depends a bit on what is causing the uncertainty in the forecast though. For the mid-latitutdes, a lot of the uncertainty comes from timing the arrival of a weather system. In these cases, the high resolution simulation doesn't help you, as it just incorporates the uncertainties of the lower resolution driving model.
The ensemble simulations that the weather servies perform will help you there, ECMWF has a really nice meteogram for individual locations [2].
IBM bought The Weather Company, which was the holding company of The Weather Channel. The forecasting technology is now owned by IBM, which licenses the weather data to The Weather Channel.
depends what you mean by 'rolling your own weather forecast'. If by that you mean you're going to do some statistical modelling on ensemble data, you're going to get a much better idea of what is likely to happen than you can from the average datasets you get on sites like windy
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.
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/
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.
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.
> , 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.
There's also a non pro version, but I'm not clear on the differences because I still have a decade or more worth of the old system credits bought to support what's always been a great app/widget.
"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."
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.
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)
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.
High pressure over the north east pacific combined with the Coriolis effect. Also the land sea border has a big influence here in this case in particular.
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.
GFS takes a simple average of the ensembles for their avg model, I believe. The biggest problem is that you can't use statistics like you normally would in meteorology. Predictions are actually very good for knowing WHAT happens to a weather system, but not WHERE it happens.
I work in the sailing space, so this is what happens there:
A racing offshore sailor would consider a variety of models and ensembles. Then they would consider the various possibilities for the weather systems and fronts (e.g. front crosses your path +/-5% East/West within a +/-3h gap). A sailor would then avoid any possible dangerous situations, and pick a path that on the most number of models gives them an optimal wind.
It is both an art and a science. If you compare the results of sailors who compete in offshore competitions (such as the Vendee globe), where the boats are all constructed in very similar ways, you'll see that the best sailors consistently get good results, and that is based on good meteorology and a good gain to risk ratio for route choice.
You'd be surprised how many people make their living on the water up here, but their understanding of forecasting seems to amount to "download windy app"!
Anyways, the word ensemble is new vocabulary for me when it comes to forecasting - things are making more sense knowing what an ensemble is.
Ensembles aren't used much outside of competition or serious industry... windy/predictwind/CMAP have usually more than enough weather for the average boater
No argument from me there! But when the forecast completely misses in SE Alaska, or one forecast model displayed in Windy is way different than others, I naturally get curious as to what happened, so have been more interested in the nuts
and bolts than is probably practical.
I'm more comfortable on the water knowing terms like ECMFW, myself!
GEFS is the noaa ensemble product. The operational GFS is actually just a single deterministic forecast run.
A lot of private providers roll up different agencies models to provide their own proper ie tart weather model because this is a lot cheaper than running the HPC required for most deterministic models.
The most important thing when checking the weather, especially with apps like windy, is to compare multiple models for your self to see how “stable” the forecasts are that day.
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.
This page needs some non-scrollable borders for mobile. Once you scroll down a bit into the map, it’s nearly impossible to get back to the browser ui controls
windy.com is great for forecasts, but you have to be careful of the model used for certain sports. (For example, the NAM model can be more accurate for low wind gusts.)
In my spare time over the last couple weeks I've been building a PWA for paramotor pilots to better visualize winds aloft: https://ppg.report.
Wind modeling - especially for aviation - is really an interesting subject. The main API I use at ppg.report is https://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/, lots fun to learn about (CIN, CAPE, the historical "soundings" manually reported from aircraft and balloons, versus the modern ones automatically pulling data from commercial flights.)
I was on a HK island when Mankut hit and Windy was incredible. It was much easier to see when what was going to hit than the local news. For the village we were staying, the local news said 12 (noon) was the worst, but it was clear in windy that would be hours later. As this thing did a lot of damage, it was kind of nice to be able to predict it well.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadThe AQI overlay is really interesting to combine with it, since it can give you an idea why certain pockets of air are lower/higher quality.
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
What's the difference?
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.
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)
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?new&wfo=...
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...
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!
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.
https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar/data?ids=KSEA&format=d...
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)
in my experience AROME tends to forecast on the drier side of the weather. Since I'm in the UK I use AROME first and flick between ECMWF. (ECMWF tends to forecast on the wetter side!!)
for the next hour(s) forcast, I tend to use rain radar - windy has this, but it's not the best I use netweather.tv (there's many others though)
Their utility depends a bit on what is causing the uncertainty in the forecast though. For the mid-latitutdes, a lot of the uncertainty comes from timing the arrival of a weather system. In these cases, the high resolution simulation doesn't help you, as it just incorporates the uncertainties of the lower resolution driving model.
The ensemble simulations that the weather servies perform will help you there, ECMWF has a really nice meteogram for individual locations [2].
[0] - https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/nwp_forecast_data/nwp_fore...
[1] - https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/approach/modelling-sys...
[2] - https://apps.ecmwf.int/webapps/opencharts/products/openchart...
I don't know why it's not there - I'm assuming it costs money
Is it not the case that IBM bought the weather channel to acquire the technology with no interest in the WC business?
Equally dangerous, but not designed to be private and a huge different set of risks.
Very dangerous.
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.
I did. And they showed me no clouds, rain or wind worth mentioning.
Here is a great resource to read up on the various models (there are far more than Windy offers): https://luckgrib.com/models/
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.
There's also a non pro version, but I'm not clear on the differences because I still have a decade or more worth of the old system credits bought to support what's always been a great app/widget.
To get the phone number:
For example, Orcas Island or, without the redirectI don't like the zooming ratio
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...
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.
I work in the sailing space, so this is what happens there:
A racing offshore sailor would consider a variety of models and ensembles. Then they would consider the various possibilities for the weather systems and fronts (e.g. front crosses your path +/-5% East/West within a +/-3h gap). A sailor would then avoid any possible dangerous situations, and pick a path that on the most number of models gives them an optimal wind.
It is both an art and a science. If you compare the results of sailors who compete in offshore competitions (such as the Vendee globe), where the boats are all constructed in very similar ways, you'll see that the best sailors consistently get good results, and that is based on good meteorology and a good gain to risk ratio for route choice.
You'd be surprised how many people make their living on the water up here, but their understanding of forecasting seems to amount to "download windy app"!
Anyways, the word ensemble is new vocabulary for me when it comes to forecasting - things are making more sense knowing what an ensemble is.
I'm more comfortable on the water knowing terms like ECMFW, myself!
A lot of private providers roll up different agencies models to provide their own proper ie tart weather model because this is a lot cheaper than running the HPC required for most deterministic models.
The most important thing when checking the weather, especially with apps like windy, is to compare multiple models for your self to see how “stable” the forecasts are that day.
https://imgur.com/a/UezBGqZ
In my spare time over the last couple weeks I've been building a PWA for paramotor pilots to better visualize winds aloft: https://ppg.report.
Wind modeling - especially for aviation - is really an interesting subject. The main API I use at ppg.report is https://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/, lots fun to learn about (CIN, CAPE, the historical "soundings" manually reported from aircraft and balloons, versus the modern ones automatically pulling data from commercial flights.)
I’m just curious because it’s not clear to me.
[0] https://community.windy.com/topic/11552/we-are-launching-win...