+1, HRDPS would be very desirable in complex coastal areas, such as those on the west coast of Canada with its many fjords and islands. Even in the Northern Puget Sound area (San Juans, Bellingham) in my experience HRDPS delivers the most accurate surface wind predictions. It seems to have an especially good accounting for local thermal effects, which often have a major impact on local winds in the summer around here.

This is the UI I currently use for HRDPS: http://canadarasp.com/RASP.html?param=sfcwind1,opacity=50,zoom=8,lat=49.19338120891148,lon=-125.31684978125907,model=hrdps,twodaydynamic=false,windgrams=false,wind_checkbox=true

Interestingly, this screenshot demonstrates that "just" freezing the animation & showing particles with their trails in static positions could be sufficient to address the performance concern, without losing the directional indication & without introducing a different visual paradigm.

I personally would use that mode to avoid my laptop fan spinning up every time I open a windy tab.

@vicb, thanks for porting the better sounding plugin! I can confirm that it works after going through the new "install" step, and then entering the plugin via the menu. On mobile, I had a hard time finding the plugin list / install workflow, and resorted to manually opening https://www.windy.com/plugins (no more trailing slash).

One thing I noticed is that plugins now seem to have proper URLs, so it could be possible to bookmark and share a full windy view using a plugin. This is excellent for power users. Hopefully, this will also enable us to share a plugin view with others, with a sensible install workflow when the plugin is not installed in that particular browser yet. Currently, when opening a URL like https://www.windy.com/plugin/sdg/48.612/-122.425?clouds,48.612,-122.425,10, I am getting high CPU usage and not much progress. This is in Firefox 122 on Linux, and Firefox 124 on Android. A profile on desktop looks like this:

I would like to add a plug for HRDPS, a high resolution model similar to HRRR but for Canada. The model is freely available from Environment Canada, and it is popular with kiters and paragliding pilots in the N of the US and Canada, mainly through the graphical view at http://canadarasp.com/. Its high resolution very frequently outperforms HRRR, especially in mountainous areas.

@nkinnan @idefix37 there is already a user preference for the particle animation speed:

Maybe adding a "None" option there could do the trick, without confusing casual users?

On the technical side, from a cursory look in the web developer console, it seems JS code is driving the animation. Freezing the animation loop in the debugger stopped the animation & CPU usage. Maybe adding "exit after one iteration" logic in that animation loop would go a long ways towards implementing a "no animation" preference?

On a recent paragliding trip I really noticed wind animations chewing through my phone battery quickly. While I was day tripping & had means of recharging my phone at the end of the day, energy usage is usually really tight on extended backcountry trips. This can be a safety issue. It would be great if we could understand wind flow forecasts without quickly running down phone batteries, and without manually toggling all wind display on & off.

I am seeing similar hanging behavior in Chromium.

@Suty, I am seeing a similar issue with wind stations:

The affected stations are accessible via search or direct link (https://www.windy.com/station/pws-38ed1449f078de59?47.940,-122.510,8,i:pressure and https://www.windy.com/station/pws-5c552daff078de59?47.988,-122.558,8,i:pressure), but not via favorites. Additionally, in at least the last 2+ months these stations are also not showing up any more in the "reported wind" layer, even at high zoom levels in that area. Both have up-to-date wind, direction & temperature reports.

Another station in an apparently even more broken state is "Flight Park South" in Salt Lake City / Draper (https://www.windy.com/?40.444,-111.891,13,i:pressure). Its latest wind reading shows up on the map, but trying to pull up details by clicking on the latest reading on the map throws this error: