Reliability

Vela77

I sail in San Diego and use Windy to plan my sailing days. Last week it looked like Saturday would be a good sailing day. On Saturday morning it only showed 6-7 kts of wind during the middle six hours of the day - not great, but enough. But it rarely got to 6 kts all day long and sometime in the afternoon the wind totally died. Like just about zero windspeed. As I was starting the engine (you cannot steer a boat with no water passing over the rudder) I looked at the app on my phone and it said I was experiencing 11 kts of wind. Wow! Wouldn't that have been nice! But the wind gauge said 1 to 1.4 kts.
I fussed with the phone to make sure I had a good Internet connection and I did. But it continued to tell me the wind speed at my location was 11.5kts.

I've been very impressed with Windy for the last year and a half or so, but have been losing confidence in it during the last month. This is the first time the errors have been so obvious, though. I can easily forgive erroneous forecasts, but the current windspeed is not a forecast, it is a measurement. If Windy cannot report that accurately, then nothing else can be considered reliable.

So I'd like to know what is going on. Is there some problem that the programmers are addressing? (If not, then they need to.) I really don't want to have to go looking for a replacement.

idefix37

@Vela77 said in Reliability:

I can easily forgive erroneous forecasts, but the current windspeed is not a forecast, it is a measurement. If Windy cannot report that accurately, then nothing else can be considered reliable.

No, the wind speed that you see on Windy is NOT a measurement. It is a forecast.
The only wind measurements that Windy display is the Reported wind by weather stations. It is a local measurement not a wind map layer.
In your area there are 5 weather models available. Have you checked them all ?

Vela77

@idefix37 So they could check an anemometer and report 1.5kts of wind, but they'd rather guess wrong by that much? It doesn't change my concern. If I cannot rely on it, I'll need to look elsewhere.

Vela77

@idefix37 I was not aware of the 5 weather models. I will check them. They are all forecasts, but just different methods? Where can I learn about them?

idefix37

@Vela77 said in Reliability:

So they could check an anemometer and report 1.5kts of wind

Who can fit an anemometer in this place at sea to check the real wind and report it in Windy ?

Check several models, especially HRRR and NAM which have higher resolution than ECMWF.
Information about each model in the mobile app:

@Suty Why did this information disappear from the browser version?

Suty

@idefix37 Hi, it is still there but not in the menu:

idefix37

@Suty
Yes, indeed. I didn’t remember it !
Thanks

Vela77

Thank you for the help. I've been on the boat the last couple of days (working on it, not sailing :-( Tomorrow I'll study up on these different options.