151–160 of 222 posts
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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
It'd be cool if you rendered winds aloft, allowing you to change altitude to see the wind at that height.
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 weathe…
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
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.
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…
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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…
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.
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…
> , 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.
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.
https://earth.nullschool.net/
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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??
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 claim…
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)