Posts made by blahdi

I am a fan of windy - kudos to windy team for this excellent product.

One question - where is Windy getting the 'current' wind speed values from ?

I live in Seattle, WA, USA. The average wind speed right now is 10mph as shown in Wunderground as well as realistically looking outside.

Windy is showing numbers like 0, 1, 3, 4 mph in many places, and in a few places the numbers seems realistic.

The same thing happened last week when there were higher winds. I had to switch to wunderground to get more realistic wind speed numbers.

I understood - I guess we are showing thunder symbol and color in windy in these conditions due to graphic limitations, rather than due to a meteorological standard. Hence, it will be confusing to a layman (not weather expert) like me. Anyways, something to explore improving in future (no rush). .thank u.

@Gkikas-LGPZ said in why is there a negative temperature in Satellite view?:

temperatures of cloud tops.
With the picker you can see the temperature, if it is less than -33C (-27 F).
By default, Windy "colorize" temps less than -27F (dark blue

That makes sense. But, How do u use the temperature of cloud tops? i.e. what temperature range implies what weather effect on the ground in general?

See the part at bottom right. The temperature scale is in Farenheit.
2 questions:

1. Is Satellite view supposed to show temperature of different areas over the past some hours?
2. why is temperature range negative?

@blahdi I mean if it is a rain based storm, it always means thunderstorms?

@Korina -thanks for responding. but, i don't understand. I am no weather expert, but is thunderstorm always linked with either snow or rain based storm? --

It would be really nice if Windy supported the option of filtering by factors such as 'chance of precipitation', temperature, cloud coverage and so on.

The areas which match the filter would be colored differently, and then we can zoom into them.

I live in Pacific Northwest where it rains and is cloudy many times, but its not rainy and cloudy everywhere. Currently, i use windy to find the areas for the least rain, clouds (which might be my preferences. others may have other preferences)

The scenario is as follows: We are planning a outdoor activity -e .g.hike, and we want to know which areas have less chances of precipitation, reasonable temperature and less cloud coverage. Then, we select Hikes in those areas.

The same scenario applies to Kayaking, additional factors would be wind speed, waves, ..

well-investigated - thank u.

The Symbol is Thunderstorm. In addition, the color is also of Thunderstorm?

There are weather warnings in my area (Seattle city in USA). But, Windy also shows thunderstorms, and none of the agencies have forecasted thunderstorms. They have forecasted snow and ice.

Windy shows color as thunderstorm warning and the icon is also thunderstorm.

btw: Weather warnings layer is awesome. Great job.

@Gkikas-LGPZ -

It looks like the Web site URL is different for different regions (local weather), but all of them are linked if u start at https://www.weather.gov/.

@ivo - its really good, specifically in the mountains or areas surrounded by mountains (e.g in the puget sound (its a bay) as well since it is in the convergence zone due to mountains).. For cities (without much impact of mountains), many sources should work..

NDFD is used by National Weather Service - US govt official weather site - if u see banner above, it says NWS and NOAA below it.
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/wxtables/index.php?wfo=sew

GFS is really bad for mountains or mountain affected terrains -

NAM is acceptable, but NDFS is much better than NAM.

You can search for a posts by a renowned weather scientist called "cliffmass" from Pacific Northwest. He has blogs on major problems with US govt published models. Unfortunately, the models do not publish their historic accuracy numbers for different terrains, and hence get away with inaccuracies. There was startup which compared the accuracies of different models for cities - and they reported one of the apps as more reliable. But, afaik, there hasn't been such a accuracy study done for mountains and water.

@idefix37 - this makes sense.

Windy team - can u pls respond when u get the chance? hoping it is as simple as adding a new URL for NDFD data. I can help u beta test it.

I know NWS web site (based on NDFD data) is popular among outdoor enthusiasts - mountaineering and sea kayaking.

@idefix37

Thank u for clarifying. This probably explains why it is relatively more accurate than NAM.

One question: Even if it is human involved and ensemble of models, do they store the 'output' data in such a way that it can be parsed by Windy? Presumably, NWS web site must be parsing the same output data to show on their web site?

@idefix37

https://www.weather.gov/mdl/ndfd_data_grid

As per someone from NOAA, (he is not part of dept that owns that web site), the web site uses the model at link above. Its called National Digital Forecast Database.

@JRep65 Pls see the example above. I use windy for mountain weather, and not for cities.

Re: Cities: Major cities should be way easy in most cases - u don't even need a county or state or even country info. Small/Minor cities - probably have duplicate names, but i never search for them and hence don't know how many duplicates are there.

For route planning interface (without weather info), checkout the caltopo.com interface. It works really well for roads, hiking trails.

It might be too much work to implement that kind of interface, but just wanted to mention it incase its easy enough.

this is a start of a awesome feature - waiting to try out the option of speed of movement and changing forecast in course of time, and GPX..

@idefix37 - yes, and the US county names are even more confusing (unusable its the right word to describe it) because the names are overlapping between States, areas and counties.

Just as an example: Washington State (is a state in USA) MAY NOT have a county called 'Washington county, but I am sure some other US state has 'Washington county'.

Then, there are mountains with same names in Washington state and Washington county - Red mountain, Iron mountain is so common in United states. If u type in mountain name Red mountain, u have no idea which place windy is giving weather about.

Thats why most web sites e.g. NOAA, NWS always give 'name of place e.g. Red mountain, name of state e.g. Washington state, name of country (e.g USA)' .. and not county name.

@idefix37 , I have sent email to NOAA asking this question. I do not know offhand which specific model that web site shows - in general, i have observed a few times (since I use both Windy-NAM and NOAA web site) that it is different than NAM.

I will let u know as soon as I get a response. Thanks!