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Windy.com

windy.com

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Re: Windy.com

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say Windy can get it wrong, isn't it really the underlying forecast models that are wrong? 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??

Rolling your own weather forecast is more akin to rolling your own election forecast (ahem). Equally dangerous, but not designed to be private and a huge different set of risks.

Political motive to change weather forecasts, and weather motive to change political forecasts.

Very dangerous.

Re: Windy.com

#143
Reminder that weather forecast apps/websites/anything are pretty much all just different UIs for the same underlying global forecasting models. With the NOAA's GFS being the most widely known one. You can find historic forecasts on NOAA's website going decades back.

Re: Windy.com

#144

Good site. I like to watch the current wind reports. Add that together with twitter reports and flightradar24 and you can actually get some idea what a wildfire is doing. It's an area where government and the local news are essentially useless.

Local emergency dispatch can be another great source.

This is a great site for dispatch streams.

They often have ftac channels too where the firefighters will be communicating.

https://www.broadcastify.com/

Re: Windy.com

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say Windy can get it wrong, isn't it really the underlying forecast models that are wrong? 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??

Rolling your own weather forecast is more akin to rolling your own election forecast (ahem). Equally dangerous, but not designed to be private and a huge different set of risks.

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

Re: Windy.com

#146
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Windy.com

#147
post #64

Since the map is using OpenStreetMap data it would be nice if it were attributed correctly: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

It's there in the bottom right corner.

Re: Windy.com

#148

Awesome. Have actually been looking for precisely this kind of data for potential use in a game that we're currently developing. Thrilled to see what appears to be a solid API too, going to dive right in. One thing I don't see mentioned, or I may just be unfamiliar with the terminology (and haven't dug much into the docs yet), is how exactly the 'map data' API (ie not the point-location API) works/what format the dat…

There are already games that use live wind data (see e.g. virtual regatta). They source data directly from NOAA/GFS rather than from an aggregator like windy

Re: Windy.com

#149

I imagine something like this could be a fantastic tool to teach about differential equations and their applications. Just looking at you can see specific hallmarks (sources and sinks), and how that sort of analysis can have super-cool uses. Does meterology use differential equations to model wind?

yes, but it takes at least a degree to even understand the basics
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