ECMWF data are not available through plugings

marekd

According to the agreement between us and ECMWF, the ECMWF forecasting model is no longer available for plugins. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

Feel free to continue developing plugins using another forecasting model (e.g. GFS). If we consider your plugin as useful, we will discuss with you possibility to incorporate your codes into our application. After this process, ECMWF will be available.

ivo

@marekd

We are sorry for this, but ECMWF considers 3rd party plugins like "another" service and therefore we can not give access to ECMWF data.

The argument, that plugins are running on windy.com domain did not help. We can not do anything with it at the moment.

Sorry

stitch

@marekd @ivo @johnckealy

It is very unfortunate that the ECMWF Organisation have prohibited the use of EC data for plugin development/use.

I would like you to seriously consider the work done by John C. Kealy and his plugin (windy-plugin-skewt@0.2.6) and make this available as a feature within the Windy platform.

I can vouch for this plugin from a professional Aviation Forecasting aspect and its usefulness and functionality within this role.

Regards
Craig

ivo

@stitch Yes. Now we are quite occupied but soon I will make some proposal how to make all you guys "Windy developers" and your plugins Windy plugins.

vicb

ECMWF was by far the most accurate and useful for my sounding plugin.

I would be really interested in having access to ECMWF again.

Thanks for your looking into this,
Vic

rittels

@ivo
Thanks. Very disappointing news. Was it any of our plugins that led to this decision by ecmwf?

ivo

@rittels No they just do not like the fact, that anyone else can use dataLoader a have access to ECMWF data. The argument that plugins just run on Windy.com did not helped a much.

ivo

@vicb Vince I have checked your plugin would you be willing to replace our official Sounding feature, with your plugin?

I have no idea how to make it work in a way of source codes since our internal plugins are bundled with a client, but we can make it work.

Gkikas LGPZ

@vicb
Vince, thank you for providing this awesome plugin!
Questions:
1). Data from 250 hPa are included in your diagram?
https://community.windy.com/topic/7963/upper-air-temperatures

2). Is there a way to have hPa in the axis (instead of meters) and Knots for wind speed (instead of km/h) ?

P.S. at https://github.com/vicb/windy-plugin-sounding
you say: "The axis units match your windy settings."
Although my settings are for hPa (pressure), ft (altitude) and kts (wind speed)
the diagram shows m (altitude) and km/h (speed).

vicb

@ivo I'm all for it if possible. As @Gkikas-LGPZ mentions the sounding is more adapted for paraglider pilots currently and I probably need to make some small changes:

The upper is currently set to 400hPa, changing it is only a setting,
The wind scale is non linear (0-30km/h on the left half, 30 to max on the right half),
I have done nothing to make it work on mobile screens.

All of this should be easy enough and there could be a setting to have a generic version or a specialized version for paraglider (a checkbox).

@Gkikas-LGPZ as mentioned above the current upper level is 400hPa but that's only a setting to change. I have just checked for the units. It seems like "ft" does not work ie altitude is always displayed in meters but "kt" works for me for the wind (You have to reload the page & plugin when you change the units). There is currently no way to have hPa on the y axis but that would be simple to implement.

vicb

@Gkikas-LGPZ please check 0.8.2 that I have just published:

Changing the units in the preferences should now work for altitude,
There is a check box ("Zoom view") at the bottom to expand to graph up to 150hPa (zoomed view is up to 400hPa).

You probably need to specify the name as sounding@0.8.2 when loading it for now.

Gkikas LGPZ

@vicb
Thank you very much!
I want to mention that data for 250 hPa (34000 ft) are not included.
Temp. @ d.p. line goes straight from 300 to 200 hPa (30 to 39 kft).

johnckealy

Hi all,

I've just finished my placement at MetService New Zealand and I'm ready to get back to some plugin fun! It's a real shame about the ECMWF data loader, though knowing EC, I guess I can see their point of view.

@vicb and I talked very briefly a few weeks back about collaborating. My suggestion would be this: how about if @vicb and I were to work on a new skewt/better sounding hybrid plugin? We could incorporate the best of both, have a nice zoom feature, a tick box for paraglider settings, cloud, options for wind arrows or barbs, mouseover data, mintra lines, customisable wind limits, etc.

We could ask @ivo about the best way to write it so that it fits easily into the windy codes as a fully functional internal windy plugin, and not just an external one (are there really that many casual windy users who know about external plugins anyway?). Since @ivo is quite busy, now might be a good time to do it. And I'm sure @Gkikas-LGPZ and @rittels would be happy to help us test it properly.

@vicb, if you prefer to keep better sounding and skewt separate, that's totally fine too. I'll start working on the new version of skewt if that's the case (I still haven't implemented the code suggestions you gave me ages ago, I plan to get into that stuff this week). But having one mega plugin that does it all and is fully available within the main windy site would be super cool, and I'd personally really get a kick out of seeing my work used like that.

This is all a huge learning experience for me as an aspiring meteorological developer, and it's awesome for me to have the chance to contribute in these ways to my favourite weather site :)

Thoughts?
@ivo @TomSlavkovsky @rittels @vicb @Gkikas-LGPZ @marekd

stitch

@vicb

I've revisited your plug-in.

Is it possible to include a numerical wind speed value next to the corresponding wind speed arrow column? The non-linear speed scale used in the vertical trace is difficult to use when determining the actual wind speed when the speed is very high through the vertical profile.

Thanks
Craig

ivo

ECMWF status

We will have a call with them tomorrow regarding licencing. We are unable to explain them, that plugins do no harm. We will let you know about result then

vicb

Quick answers as I don't have much time right now
@Gkikas-LGPZ There is no data at 250hPa for GFS
@johnckealy It would be great if we can come with only one codebase and a few options. That would be less to maintain and more maintainers.
@stitch I have a linear scale in unzoomed view ready. I only need to publish it, probably later today.
@ivo great, thanks !

rittels

@ivo @vicb @johnckealy @okocedion @marekd @TomSlavkovsky

They have to understand that it is not anybody who uses the dataLoader, really only a few of us. We can use gfs to experiment, and then apply for access to ecmwf, if the plugin qualifies. Obviously you will check that we do not post data elsewhere. Which we will definitely not do!!

It would be great if the approved plugins are then more integrated in Windy.

I really appreciate that you allow us to build plugins on windy. Great fun.