Hurricane Ian wind speeds vs windy shown wind speeds
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I am on windy app at 9am EST. The hurricane tracker on the app says wind speeds are 155mph but when I scroll the wind tracker around the hurricane the highest wind speeds I find are about 100mph to the west of the eyewall. So what is the more accurate indicator of wind? What the hurricane tracker says or the wind speeds that the Windy app is actually showing around the eye of the storm?
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@utschy
I guess you look at the NOAA forecast on the Windy hurricane tracker as it is the default setting.
The other one is the ECMWF forecast. The NOAA forecast is based on the official track from the NHC. This Center uses several models like that one of the ECMWF and the GFS model. But in addition they use specialised hurricane models like HWRF and HMON. They include also the wind and pressure reported by flight recon and the Dvorak analyse based on satellite imagery. At the end they make an estimate based on sustained winds over 1-minute. This determines the category of the hurricane according to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
When you look at the Wind layer in Windy, it is the forecast of a particular weather model which is not based on 1-minute wind but 10-minutes (the difference is about 15%). Then the resolution of these models and the way how they compute the wind forecast cannot give the same result as that of the NHC.
So you better use the wind estimation of the NOAA tracker. -
I idefix37 referenced this topic on
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@utschy it’s actually 10 minutes, which is 1.15x weaker than the 1 minute estimate. So it’s actually 115mph that’s shown. Look at “Gust”. The wind gusts are what I use to categorise the forecast hurricane, not the 10 minute winds. So lower the colour thresholds by 1.15x. 65 mph in 10 minutes becomes 75 in 1, and 60 becomes 70. 100 becomes 115. You will find it line up the scale better to the 1 minute speed.
