Displaying weather Fronts notations.
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Can you display weather Fronts with future projections? Similar to what Noaa’s ocean prediction center pacific analyst maps display.
https://ocean.weather.gov/Pac_tab.php
While this is an old notation we’ve see on news weather channels, I find the NOAA prediction of where air masses are moving to very useful for a quick glance when out at sea.
Captain Jack
Captain Jack
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@captainjack63
Hi Capt’n
Windy visualizes only weather models data and up to now these models are NOT able to draw fronts. They are drawn usually by meteorologists so there is no solution at the moment to display fronts on Windy.
You would like to see similar analysis / forecast fronts maps as those of NOAA. How many meteorologists are employed by this agency? None by Windy. -
@captainjack63
Fortunately for the meteorologists working for NOAA or other national institutes, their work and analysis cannot be always replaced by an application or a computer as it is the case for the front map for instance.
Having said that, there are couple of things you can do with Windy to try to see front, and air mass with different temperatures :- check the humidity above 90% (very critical) and at 700hPa and 600hPa. You should see the fronts as illustrated :
The red zone shows the front, with humidity above 90% and just after, you can see a huge drop of the humidity with the brown zone
- check the temperature at 850hPa to follow air mass temperatures. Ideally, you should use the potential temperature (a temperature among others which doesn’t vary with the altitude) but this temperature is not available with Windy. Nevertheless, temperatures at 850hPa will allow you to compare different air mass and follow them, especially on the sea because hills and mountains could otherwise interfere at this level.
Same picture as above, same moment. You can see the temperature differences, as there is an air mass at 0°C followed by an air mass at 4°C. This confirms the front identified above with the humidity map and on top, you see that it is a warm front
This type of analysis will not replace a front map draws by professionals but at least you can get something thanks to Windy - check the humidity above 90% (very critical) and at 700hPa and 600hPa. You should see the fronts as illustrated :
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ECMWF does it here: https://apps.ecmwf.int/r/cdb/ (see detailed description via control Help).
But I think this should remain generated and provided by Met institutes.
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@vsinceac
Well, all the data should be here in ready to draw KML format: https://ocean.weather.gov/gis/index.phpThe top item "Unified Surface Analysis" should contain the long/lat coordinates of the fronts (likely just a list of the positions of the blue / red / orange symbols of the front).
If Windy don't care to develop this, it would make a neat project for some budding meteroligist to develop as a Windy plugin: https://api.windy.com/
(As you may infer, I haven't actually explored this any further than writing this post, so be sure to check feasibility prior to committing. One issue I forsee is that this data is only updated 4 times daily, and it would be hard to animate them for all the inbetween times that Windy displays.)
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@jakelewis3d said in Displaying weather Fronts notations.:
The top item "Unified Surface Analysis" should contain the long/lat coordinates of the fronts (likely just a list of the positions of the blue / red / orange symbols of the front).
Edit: Yes, it should, but sadly it's just a low res rasterization, which will look awful when magnified
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The so-called "kml" files provided by OPC/NOAA for these still experimental products don't contain any vector data; they just contain static links to bitmap files (here, png) and their coverage. This is far not enough to be rendered on dynamic web maps.
