Poor Radar FOREVER. Cancelling.
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Cancelling Windy due to ridiculously WRONG radar imagery. You have no excuse.
I wanted weather data services that were not abject lies. Sorry, when snowflakes the size of dimes are falling outside and visibility is far below a mile, yet your radar provider (once again) does not show anything on the image, you have no excuse. You are a lousy meteorology site when it comes to displaying non-heavy precipitation.
Enjoy your windsurfing, since clearly you never cared about actual weather. I am literally cancelling, as I begin looking up the process after posting this. I stopped using Windy for the most part (after commenting on the problem), but I hoped you would fix this. You have not. NO excuse.
It's intolerable for snow to be falling for half an hour across a wide area and you lie to your users by showing nothing. Yes, it's a lie. In order to save money, I suppose, you have continued with the world's worst radar data provider.
Since I am leaving now, good riddance as well to fake satellite images. Your animations create fake data to fill in gaps. I don't want giggly fun satellite images. I don't want the TikTok channel. As a former professional meteorologist, I like REAL data to tell me about the REAL world I live in, not some phony "ooh, pretty pictures" world your business model aims to sell. And don't tell me I can change it in settings. You won't let my settings stay permanent.
When it's snowing enough to cover the ground, that requires REAL data not a pretty picture of nothing that your radar data provider sends you Enjoy the fifty cents you saved with the "advanced" fake data they provide you. CANCELLING.
In one final point of sadness, let me say I was said when the Republican politicians destroyed the great display features available at the NWS. They cut funding and had top leaders also make it hard to create a centralized public-facing mapping and analysis page. They were pushed quite vigorously by the (quite really immoral) Accuweather Myer's family and their political donations to seek control of what should be public data. Joel Myer's is a super-creep and a real d-bag, as those who worked for him in State College found out whenever they tried to go to work for anybody but his company-town Crapuweather.
I was further saddened when Wunderground sold out and was crippled by the Weather Channel's company, and then by IBM. Want to know how moronic they are? Look at the Wunderground map and select the COVID-19 map. Yes, that's the level of usefulness they care about. The same map for two years, basically, nothing useful about it.
Finally, Windy came along. People like me paid in hoping it would improve. Then somebody there decided they might add features, but showing precipitation would just be too negative. #ItNeverRainsOnMyParadeAtWindy!
Windy refuses to get real radar data. This issue is year's old. It breaks my heart to see humanity is simply incapable of having government or private companies provide decent, basic, ACCURATE, TRUTHFUL weather data for the public.Keep the money, I guess, even for all the months I never used Windy. I waited and waited. You broke me. I give up on finding a competent provider of Wx data. And one final tip. Don't be like Microsoft, even though you're trying. For thirty years now, Microsoft has had the problem of desktop icons getting rearranged, THIRTY FREAKING YEARS AND IT STILL HAPPENS WITH NO RECOVERY FEATURE. You're trying the same thing, sort of. You have "settings" for paying customers, but they get lost each time a person's g cookies get deleted. How many years will this go on? Don't be like Microsoft. You're already providing sh&tty radar data. That's a bad enough job of being lazy, you don't need to not try harder even more.
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@bruzote Hello, I am sorry that you feel this way. We have asked you in one of your previous posts about radar, what is your radar source, you used to compare with Windy. However the question remained unanswered. If you want us to investigate the precipitation differences, please provide source for comparison.
Korina
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@korina
love windy for accurate modal data, satellite data, and many many other things(you have done a excellent job), but do agree that the radar is missing many of the features it could have. The smoothness is great for a clean picture, but poses problems for light or moderate snow. It is also slow as there is no per station function, or any other layers.For anyone who wants free per station radar with all the bells and whistles you may want to check out the WXL23 app, there is a bit of a learning curve. One day I am sure windy will have this, it will probably take years, in the meantime you can get almost instant radar data with many different radar options at the app below.
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@cswarm34 by the way, windy does have real radar (even if it is a poor quality) and the satellite data is pretty good. Windy has more features then any other weather app that I know of, and it is better then weather underground ever was!!! There is no other place where you can get weather models for free in a user friendly way.
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@korina - I answered your question now. Your old question was basically, "Don't expect us to do our job, keep working for us for free to do Windy QC for us." You can read that reply. It is quite easy to go to other websites and compare data. Find the situations when common radar resources for the public show one general picture and you show another "story". I have cancelled. I am paid through December, so unless you would be decent enough to send me a pro-rated refund, I will be commenting until then.
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@cswarm34 - I have seen cars sold that have more features than others but they were recalled because they presented a safety risk. I am glad you don't write the government recall rules. You would be standing up for t he those companies who shaft customers with poor performance. As for some any person needing smoothness, usually smoothness is necessary for getting modelling of data to work for prediction or feature highlighting. I doubt many users are putting Windy data through feature analysis or modelling. Most people in the whole world, not just Windy customers, want to know WHERE IS IT PRECIPITATING, HOW MUCH, AND WHAT KIND OF PRECIPITATION. Try polling people and ask if they want to know such things. As a former meteorologist who did both public and military forecasts and was surrounded by others doing the same (including publicly recognizable people), I assure you one of the most frequent concerns of customers surrounded precipitation. Prioritizing some "pretty picture" smoothing over letting customers where the precipitation is located is a terrible prioritization choice.
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@bruzote
Windy is called windy for a reason, they put the most time into getting weather modals, for free to the general public and they are still doing that as evident with the HRRR.About the radar, most people are fine with a pretty radar and it satisfies their needs. Unfortunately windys audience attracts people who like and know the weather. A smoothed radar does not satisfy me or probably a-lot of windys users because it is not accurate. Windy is a small team, they have to keep the current code bug free, updated and have a-lot of other responsibilities, coding new stuff takes time and small companies need alot of it to make a quality product.
Why they don’t have a good radar I do not know but I believe they never put alot of time into that, they put more time into modals and I hope one day they put more time into the radar. Until then, they still have a-lot of work to get more modals in their algorithm.
You can find a good free radar,but you can’t find a good free weather app with all the weather models, Windy is changing that.If you just want good radar, windy is not for you
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@cswarm34 - Thanks for that perspective. However, I don't want BAD data. WIndy's data is not just "smoothed" in a conventional way, it is SUPPRESSED. I have worked with raw radar data. That kind of imagery would be what I expect when ground clutter is removed by only showing higher angle radar returns, then adding smoothing.
Smoothing refers to tamping down gradients, so sudden changes in a signal are reduced. Windy's radar source eliminates whole areas of precip the size of small states! That goes well beyond conventional smoothing. They seem to be using a simple filter whereby some signals are completely ignored, not just smoothed.
Also, despite what you've said about me, I am not looking for JUST radar. However, I certainly do not want seemingly arbitrarily filtered data (with the net effect it is missing). Windy STILL has not given an explanation as to why their radar source sucks eggs. To what purpose is Windy's source opting to filter out actual precipitation? The other day people in Pennsylvania died in a snow squall on the highway. I had snow squalls around me as well. When it comes to shallow convection snow squalls, Windy's radar source often presents the image akin to negligible virga, not something that obstructs visibility and even affects vehicle braking.
Why does Windy find that acceptable? Windy won't even engage in that conversation. THAT is COMPLETELY unacceptable to for me to be coming from a service that presents itself as trying to please its customers. Few things annoy me off in life like a person who refuses to even give a reason for their choices that are negatively affecting people. If they can't give a reason, is there an emotional problem where they can't discuss the issue because of some prior trauma in their lives regarding accurate radar? I doubt it. So why? Seriously, how the heck can Windy's team not discuss WHY their source is filtering out data (not smoothing). Thanks, again, though, for at least engaging honestly. Windy seems quite unwilling to even do that. :-b
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Hi @Bruzote,
I compared Windy US radar with Accuweather US radar. It seems that Windy has worse spatial resolution. Maybe that it is the problem you are talking about. Downsampled data get smoothed. We will try to improve this.
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@tz currently in Ohio Pennsylvania and New York, windy is NOT picking up most of the individual lake effect snow cells compared to my radar. Have screen shots but can’t figure out how to upload them.
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@cswarm34 This forum allows image uploading. If it is screenshot, it is probably big png image which can not be uploaded. Try to convert it to jpeg and/or resize it to smaller dimensions before uploading.
