i'm assuming this is where my most-used map lately has been getting their data. air quality overlaid with fire locations and wind direction is super handy
This reminds me a lot of another project[1] that I've used for years, but Windy seems more responsive and has an app. They're close enough I wonder if the null school one was an influence. Definitely an impressive visualization.
I've been using the Android app (with a subscription) all summer for sailing. It's good enough to help me decide 72 hours in advance which day to go out and on what body of water. Also helps determining if I'll need to have another meat bag onboard (beside my own) to keep the mast pointing up during gusts, so I have a time to make phone calls.
When you click on a forecast you can choose the model or forecast provider, and you can set your default with an account. Windy.com just organizes the data, especially grouped by outside activity such as surfing, sailing, parasailing, but uses other data sources and doesn’t create its own forecasts.
For my microclimate, I’ve found that Meteoblue is the only forecast that doesn’t forecast the high temperature 10 degrees too low when there is a heat wave.
Windy visualizations raw or direct outputs from the weather forecast models run by agencies in the USA and Europe. These models are the "bread and butter" of operational weather forecasting, and are the baseline in accuracy for all weather forecasts generally.
That being said, you shouldn't treat these outputs as gospel. All these models will get the big picture correct, but they have limitations with respect to spatial resolution. So if you click on the Windy map and look at your local forecast, take it with a grain of salt - the model doesn't resolve down to the scale of your backyard. The status quo is for companies or agencies to use statistics or ML to "correct" the forecast against local observations, which dramatically improves the accuracy of forecasts like, "What will tomorrow's max temperature be" or, "what is the probability it will rain this evening?"
I need to combine it with some other site like weather underground because it seems to me that windy uses past model outputs for current conditions, instead of actual observations. So it’s as good as anything for the near future, but not great for the present.
Windy is definitely the ideal weather app for geeks. My favorite feature is the ability to switch between the 6 forecast models or even see all of them at the same time.
Along these lines, but the other direction and something I've seen developing is niche expert local forecasts. I follow a few, surfing, sailing etc.
Surfline [1] do an excellent (paid) regional analysis, and the best aspect is the long range outlook where they will incorporate any levels of uncertainty or conflict between the various weather models into their analysis. To the lay person there may be "the forecast", but interpreting the different models and incorporating local anomalies is very valuable.
Also excellent is the UK Met office 10 day trend[2], to get an idea of the uncertainty and macro patterns at play.
In the US we have Area Forecast Discussions (AFDs) issued by regional weather offices. They are a great resource and I wish more people outside aviation knew about them. They will generally include a high level discussion, detailed conversations about each forecast period, as well as aviation and marine (if applicable) considerations. Usually gives some great insight into what, for example “chance of showers” really means.
Great for Mastodon adoption for sure. And even better smarts on NWS for diversifying their alert systems, especially outside of a large corporate-owned platform.
He's operating outside of NWS by taking a converted feed from elsewhere. Iowa State I think. But he's offered to let the government take the whole thing over if they want. It's kind of important that someone does this, glad he stepped up.
You have always been able to roll your own code as well. There are Python libraries to produce verbose readouts of FAA METAR reports, for example.
Good point that the starting point of the data in this case is publicly available APIs, but, and this will sound backwards, centralizing ones main firehose on a decentralized platform seems like a great way to reach the masses, including individuals but also smaller media outlets that don't interface directly with those initial APIs.
I use a different free app for forecasts, and it typically catches thermal winds like sea breezes with the default model. I still get skunked every now and then and show up at the beach with a board and not enough wind to go fast...
I'd like one of these for snorkeling. The experience depends a lot on weather conditions and micro-geographical factors.
1) underwater visibility around land masses is dependant on precipitation and swell conditions over the previous few days - i.e. the water will be murky if it's been pissing down and blowing a gale for the last 2 days. This is not so much a factor around offshore islands in deep water with strong currents.
2) In hilly areas, it's best to go out when there is an offshore wind, as the land mass shields the water from the wind, making the surface smoother.
3) people have preferences as to the direction and tide (incoming/outgoing/time after low/high tide).
4) It's great when the sun is out, and if you are spearfishing then you want the sun at your back so the fish can't see you.
In short there are a a lot of factors that, in some magical snorkeling forecast system, could all be rolled up into a score out of 10 for a specific geographical spot at a specific time.
The aviation METARs and TAFs are pretty nice, because they give the dew point, which can't usually be found on other weather forecasts. The Met Office and their peers of course use this information as part of their calculations, but it is nice to see it yourself because relative to the temperature it tells you at what altitude you can expect clouds and/or rain to form.
And yes, Windy has dew point as a layer!
PS. Relevant username ;) Windsurfing, traditional sailing, both?
The My Radar app* on iOS has a wind layer and I highly recommend it. We live in one the windiest parts of the world/stuck out in the ocean, and it's very helpful to know the wind, especially on a beach or outside activity day.
Windy is my favourite app. I love to watch the movement of the clouds and rain/snow patterns. It is so much better than anything else out there. I really hope it stays true to its roots and not become crappy like other weather apps have become over the period (weather.com for instance).
This has been my go to weather site since I heard of it last year. I've yet to find another website or app with the variety of detailed radar views that windy has, and seems to be extremely accurate.
yr.no (app and web) is from the Norwegian weather institute, it has wind and rain layers too and work all over the world. They're is also has a free api [1]
I may be biased being Norwegian myself, but it's my favorite weather app. No spam or ads or anything either.
Somewhat on topic: what's a good site and/or app to get a non-sensationalized and understandable overview of the Atlantic hurricane situation. I wanted to check on the wind shear, water temperature, and forecast. Especially after the recent articles about the hot tub level temps around Florida, and others about how wind shear is preventing hurricanes from forming in the Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean.
Thank you, it is really good. I was able to find the wind shear forecast pretty easily, and cycle through a lot of detailed images. (obviously, understanding that the further out I go, the wider the error bars will be)
Here's hoping that the wind shear continues to stay strong enough to protect people from any bad hurricanes. Although I don't know what will happen if that ocean energy isn't "bled off" by a few big storms?
It could also potentially cause fires as cells spin off and lightning strikes hit areas that are at risk. IIRC this is how the fires at Big Basin SP started a couple years ago.
It's interesting how they still need to do some fudging around the poles. Non-Euclidean geometry is hard, I guess. I wonder if that means the models are all done with Euclidean geometry or is it just a display thing?
Most of all models are resolved in some sort of projected space. It depends on the model (e.g GFS uses an inflated cube, the ICON global from dwd is projected on to an icosahedron, IFS just moves most of the calcs to a spectral space instead of point-grid, and many regional/meso scale domains use a conic projection). Also by and large it’s easier to assume the earth is spherical and then nudge any differences in datum to Mach your crs.
Most often, final global models are output on to an orthogonal (plate-caree) lat/lon grid. Data at the poles (singularity) is always a bit fidly
What is the reason for modelling on a projected space? It seems to me at least mathematically to be fine to come up with equations in polar coordinates. It's still a metric space with great circle distance. Is it a performance tradeoff? I Euclidean distance is a lot easier to calculate.
I didn't know that! Windys color scheme is a lot clearer (and I like you see hiking trail numbers on it) but OSM shows hiking refuges when more zoomed out.
It is based on mapy.cz [1] - Outdoor layer. It is mostly OSM based (plus lot of their own data for Czechia and Slovakia). Mapy.cz belongs to same guy, who runs Windy (Ivo Lukačovič [2]). IMHO it is best readable map on the internet and when I am used to it, I cant find anything on Google Maps.
Windy is as good as advertised. On a bit of a sad note, they just recently moved a number of their longtime standard features behind a subscription wall.
I still have their previous android app version, the ungelded one. It's promising unspecified delights if I'd only just upgrade.
epilogue: I have an odd issue with Firefox nightly and sites using wind animation. I get colored, vertical bars overlaying the entire page. I can see a ghost of the content behind the bars. It's only on one device. I can't find any reference to anyone else having this issue. Perhaps someone else does and is looking for a pattern. (keywords: firefox, nightly, wind animation, Windy, possible HN rules violation)
Very useful for sailing, but also biking, hiking, any kind of outdoor activity. Turns out a certain temperature with 5 mph wind feels very different from the same temperature with 20 mph wind.
I like this app for being forward about the weather models that it uses and letting you choose between them. Most regular places that show weather present the work as "their" forecast, but they're typically repackaging weather model information. No pretense here.
Well, it has Radar (for Europe, US and some parts of the rest) & Satellite layer (whole world), which shows you current conditions. It can also show meteo-stations with current values of temperature, pressure and so on.
I've been using it for a while. It's pretty good yet I think the accuracy of weather prediction could be better (at least in my part of France). Real-time rain and wind is really useful though and much easier to use than all weather website out there.
In my part of the US, I find the GFS model is most accurate in the summer months and ECMWF does better in the winter. I haven’t really figured out which one works best in the transitional months.
I think they do not make any forecast themselves, just aggregate sources: at least in 2018 since in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D I can read: "As of May 2018 it had a team of six employees, and 300,000 users visiting the site per day": pretty hard to imagine world forecast with only six employees :)
I like windy but the radar is problematic, areas of blue typically are seeing no rainfall hitting the ground. I feel like the radar view is overstating the weather to look more impressive.
National weather radar is difficult to interpret. It isn't showing what people intuit it is showing, the relationship between that picture and what is going on outside is complicated. To make it even more complicated, weather radars switch modes depending on the weather conditions in their area of coverage which causes the underlying phenomenon they are measuring to change, so it isn't even consistent in that sense. The underlying metadata captures the operating radar mode but most people will have no idea what to do with that information.
And then there is the fact that weather radar captures a lot of phenomena that are not "weather".
Most rain never reaches the ground and the radar is measuring rain that is very far above ground level, so it generates false positives.
Reliable at-ground-level rain measurement has to come from other sources, like automotive sensors, ground weather stations, RF propagation measurements in mobile networks, etc. The downside is that these often have much less coverage than the radar.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadwith regards of quality of forecast I don't know: don't really know if they just aggregate other's data or make some kind of forecast themselves.
https://api.windy.com/
https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map
[1]: https://earth.nullschool.net/
https://www.windy.com/articles/what-is-forecast-model-3397
For my microclimate, I’ve found that Meteoblue is the only forecast that doesn’t forecast the high temperature 10 degrees too low when there is a heat wave.
That being said, you shouldn't treat these outputs as gospel. All these models will get the big picture correct, but they have limitations with respect to spatial resolution. So if you click on the Windy map and look at your local forecast, take it with a grain of salt - the model doesn't resolve down to the scale of your backyard. The status quo is for companies or agencies to use statistics or ML to "correct" the forecast against local observations, which dramatically improves the accuracy of forecasts like, "What will tomorrow's max temperature be" or, "what is the probability it will rain this evening?"
Surfline [1] do an excellent (paid) regional analysis, and the best aspect is the long range outlook where they will incorporate any levels of uncertainty or conflict between the various weather models into their analysis. To the lay person there may be "the forecast", but interpreting the different models and incorporating local anomalies is very valuable.
Also excellent is the UK Met office 10 day trend[2], to get an idea of the uncertainty and macro patterns at play.
[1] https://www.surfline.com/surf-forecasts/north-cornwall/58581... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLccinRLccA&list=PLGVVqeJodR...
Example: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=OKX&issuedby=O...
https://www.patreon.com/posts/alternate-alerts-81852206
You have always been able to roll your own code as well. There are Python libraries to produce verbose readouts of FAA METAR reports, for example.
https://nwsnow.net/
1) underwater visibility around land masses is dependant on precipitation and swell conditions over the previous few days - i.e. the water will be murky if it's been pissing down and blowing a gale for the last 2 days. This is not so much a factor around offshore islands in deep water with strong currents.
2) In hilly areas, it's best to go out when there is an offshore wind, as the land mass shields the water from the wind, making the surface smoother.
3) people have preferences as to the direction and tide (incoming/outgoing/time after low/high tide).
4) It's great when the sun is out, and if you are spearfishing then you want the sun at your back so the fish can't see you.
In short there are a a lot of factors that, in some magical snorkeling forecast system, could all be rolled up into a score out of 10 for a specific geographical spot at a specific time.
And yes, Windy has dew point as a layer!
PS. Relevant username ;) Windsurfing, traditional sailing, both?
*https://apps.apple.com/us/app/myradar-weather-radar/id322439...
This is also very cool (awesome URL!), and I'll be mentioning it in my next blog post.
[1] https://m.facebook.com/windyforecast/videos/windy-donations/...
I may be biased being Norwegian myself, but it's my favorite weather app. No spam or ads or anything either.
[1] https://developer.yr.no/
Here's hoping that the wind shear continues to stay strong enough to protect people from any bad hurricanes. Although I don't know what will happen if that ocean energy isn't "bled off" by a few big storms?
I'm using it to monitor Hurricane Hillary that is currently on its way to Los Angeles: https://www.windy.com/?19.808,-114.170,5
They also have a hurricane tracker that overlays the forecast cone: https://www.windy.com/-Hurricane-tracker/hurricanes/hilary?s...
It's interesting how they still need to do some fudging around the poles. Non-Euclidean geometry is hard, I guess. I wonder if that means the models are all done with Euclidean geometry or is it just a display thing?
Most often, final global models are output on to an orthogonal (plate-caree) lat/lon grid. Data at the poles (singularity) is always a bit fidly
EDIT: https://i.imgur.com/WBiptdo.png for example on OSM, vs https://i.imgur.com/EsZCsA8.png on Windy
[1] https://en.mapy.cz [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D
I still have their previous android app version, the ungelded one. It's promising unspecified delights if I'd only just upgrade.
I like this app for being forward about the weather models that it uses and letting you choose between them. Most regular places that show weather present the work as "their" forecast, but they're typically repackaging weather model information. No pretense here.
It has a layer selector with temperature, wind, pressure and precipitation.
the list is scrollable
[0] https://community.windy.com/topic/6605/real-time-lightning-s...
And then there is the fact that weather radar captures a lot of phenomena that are not "weather".
Reliable at-ground-level rain measurement has to come from other sources, like automotive sensors, ground weather stations, RF propagation measurements in mobile networks, etc. The downside is that these often have much less coverage than the radar.