Very bad predictions

Bastien Boulnois

I travel since 3 months in Méditerranée.
The forecast was good less than 10% of the time.
It’s horrible.
Wave, wind, current… nothing is good

Actuellement 36nds établi, 14nds prévu
Juste bravo !!!!!

Canne

Lisez :
Jean-Yves Bernot: Météo & Stratégie, Croisière et course au large
Chapitre 23 La Météorologie de la Méditerranée
concernant la difficulté avec les phénomènes locaux pour les modèles numériques. Conclusion ch23: ailleurs, on calcule, en Méditerranée, on réagit !

Welcome to the Mediterranean ! While you can certainly find numerical models with higher density from other paying services such as PredictWind, I personally prefer to use the above book and my own judgment when planning a crossing : preparing for the worst and hoping for the best! Windy gives some loose hints for that.

idefix37

@Bastien-Boulnois
As @Canne points out, weather forecasting in the Mediterranean is particularly difficult for low or medium resolution weather models. You do not say which weather model you used in Windy. Many people are only using the default model, but Windy offers several others. It is always useful to look at them all.
You do not specify in which part of the Mediterranean you encountered these poor wind forecasts. In the Mediterranean near the coasts or islands all often mountainous, weather forecasting is difficult because of katabatatic winds, sea breezes, local winds… Then convective systems are often increased and forecasting locally the strong squalls below a cumulonimbus or a supercell is not possible.

idefix37

@Bastien-Boulnois
To illustrate my previous post, a good example is the case of the storm in Corsica on August 18, 2022, which surprised many boaters and caused several casualties.
As specified by this article from the SNSM - the National Sea Rescue Society, only the AROME 1.3km model had predicted this event (I had seen it on Windy on the morning of August 18).
None of the other models, including ECMWF, the default model in Windy, had predicted this very violent event. Even Météo-France had not anticipated this storm.