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Windy.com

windy.com

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Re: Windy.com

#111
post #70

Some past threads: 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…

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.

Re: Windy.com

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work for me on Firefox in Windows either. I've tried a number of things and it seems it just doesn't work on Firefox at all.

Works fine for me in Firefox on Mac.

And for me in Firefox 91.4.0 on Android.

Re: Windy.com

#113
post #63

The wind animation doesn't work at all for me in Firefox (on Linux, version 91). I see a few large animation "sheets" where the wind is moving in the same direction, depending on where on the map I look. Works in Chromium. Anyone else have this problem? Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/eLyQa6X.jpg

Doesn't work for me on Firefox in Windows either. I've tried a number of things and it seems it just doesn't work on Firefox at all.

Do you happen to be using color management by any chance? Believe it or not (because this does seem insane), disabling full color management fixed the site for me. That is, I changed the setting "gfx.color_management.mode" from 1 (manage all colors) back to 2, the default (which only adjusts the colors of images with tagged color profiles).

It's bonkers, but I think I understand what's happening here, actually. Relatively recently, Firefox started color correcting the content of elements. However, some sites will download an image, load it into a canvas created in Javascript, and then use the data for some other purpose.

In particular, Windy downloads a bunch of what appears to be wind data in the form of false color images like [1][2]. Presumably they are using this data to generate the wind animation on the fly in the browser. However, if they're utilizing canvases as part of that process, (my copy of) Firefox is changing the colors out from under them as part of the color management process. Presumably a large enough change in the colors would be enough to break the wind display code completely.

[1] https://ims.windy.com/im/v3.0/forecast/ecmwf-hres/2021091012...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/z3hQKvs.jpg (backup of [1] in case the link dies)

Re: Windy.com

#114
post #63

The wind animation doesn't work at all for me in Firefox (on Linux, version 91). I see a few large animation "sheets" where the wind is moving in the same direction, depending on where on the map I look. Works in Chromium. Anyone else have this problem? Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/eLyQa6X.jpg

Could this be a hardware problem? I've been working on a WebGL project and often different graphics cards have different precision from 8 to 16 to 128 bits. I've seen similar quirks when precision truncates calculations.

Edit: Testing different hardware reminds me of the IE5-8 days. Sigh...

Re: Windy.com

#115
post #69
post #63

The wind animation doesn't work at all for me in Firefox (on Linux, version 91). I see a few large animation "sheets" where the wind is moving in the same direction, depending on where on the map I look. Works in Chromium. Anyone else have this problem? Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/eLyQa6X.jpg

Weird. I'm using Firefox 91.0.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 and it works fine. Maybe try opening it in a new empty profile and see if it works?

I did end up getting it to work, left a comment here if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28488599

Re: Windy.com

#116

I really like Windy's base maps. How did they generate them and what's the style?

They're using Mapy.cz. Same location in Mapy.cz and Google Maps: https://mapy.cz/turisticka?x=14.1857611&y=49.9310438&z=14 https://www.google.com/maps/@49.931472,14.185431,14z

So pardon my ignorance in all things GIS, but it looks like Mapy.cz serves the tiles which are based on OpenStreetMap. On that Mapy.cz site, there is no style that is similar to Windy. The maps I see are "Basic", "Traffic", "Outdoor", etc.

I'm interested in the grey/outlines basemap like this: https://www.windy.com/-Weather-radar-radar?radar,50.310,1.15... . The shading around the coastlines in particular is exquisite.

How did they generate this grey basemap? Does Mapy.cz offer the tools to generate such a map or do they just host the tiles?

Re: Windy.com

#117
post #39

Windy is fantastic. 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…

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.

Re: Windy.com

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work for me on Firefox in Windows either. I've tried a number of things and it seems it just doesn't work on Firefox at all.

Do you happen to be using color management by any chance? Believe it or not (because this does seem insane), disabling full color management fixed the site for me. That is, I changed the setting "gfx.color_management.mode" from 1 (manage all colors) back to 2, the default (which only adjusts the colors of images with tagged color profiles). It's bonkers, but I think I understand what's happening here, actually. Relat…

Interesting. It still works for me even with gfx.color_management.mode set to 1. Might be hardware differences or maybe desktop (compositing, etc). I'm using XFCE defaults.

Re: Windy.com

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work for me on Firefox in Windows either. I've tried a number of things and it seems it just doesn't work on Firefox at all.

Do you happen to be using color management by any chance? Believe it or not (because this does seem insane), disabling full color management fixed the site for me. That is, I changed the setting "gfx.color_management.mode" from 1 (manage all colors) back to 2, the default (which only adjusts the colors of images with tagged color profiles). It's bonkers, but I think I understand what's happening here, actually. Relat…

Wow. Nice find. I also use a canvas to stitch together elevation data encoded as PNGs [1]. Will definitely look into this.

The road to bugs is paved with good intentions.

[1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*zRx4LGdE_sxxRip7.png

Re: Windy.com

#120

I really like Windy's base maps. How did they generate them and what's the style?

They're using Mapy.cz. Same location in Mapy.cz and Google Maps: https://mapy.cz/turisticka?x=14.1857611&y=49.9310438&z=14 https://www.google.com/maps/@49.931472,14.185431,14z

Actually that is an excellent map, thanks!
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