Local Effects
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I live in Queenstown, New Zealand. We have a lake, one branch south of where I live runs North South between two mountain ranges. We are inland, even so, we experience from time-to-time strong southerly winds. This morning as you will see from the enclosed screen shots, there was no southerly gradient or strong winds around Queenstown. However, there was a strong southerly wind that started not long before the screen shots were taken. I did not expect the strong wind when I left for my morning walk. I used Windy.com to see if I could see a reason, and yes, I saw it. A shallow low to the NW and a weak ridge to the SE (see screenshots). I would have been amazed if Windy.com had picked up the local effect (strong southerly). Had I not been a strong weather enthusiast for nearly my whole life, I might of concluded that Windy.com was not working very well and this might be a conclusion some people arrive at for their places.
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As you say, local effects cannot be picked up by the weather models because there is no high resolution model over New Zealand able to get them, in Queenstown between mountains and lake.
However in the detailed forecast table METEOBLUE model is generally better in mountains particularly for temperature. But this non-gridded model is not available as a map.
You can use the “Compare” table too
Selecting the airport weather station in Queenstown you can use the “Observation vs forecast” feature.
On Sunday morning the models were forecasting weaker winds than the real one.
Note that on a week average METEOBLUE show less error for wind forecast.
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@idefix37
@Ackem
Similar situation in the other side of planet Earth
https://community.windy.com/topic/12872/wrong-wind-data/4?_=1747722927247 -
@Gkikas-LGPZ
@Ackem
You are right, wind funelling between 2 mountains is probably the good explanation for a local wind acceleration. It is a very local effect that the worldwide models cannot reveal.
