Hi, I am Ivo, founder of Windy.com.

The times we are living in are not normal. We, pilots, kiters, sailors, and all the outdoor people value freedom the most. Yet we are being told to stay home.

Most of us, including me, have no fear of death, and some of us, also including me, challenged life-threatening situations a few times. Yes, death is an integral part of life, and we all have to die someday. Yet we are witnessing the panic and hysteria that is not the equal danger we are facing.

At Windy, we are working from home, using teleconferences to see each other, so everything is running as usual, and we have no service outages at all. But making innovations in this environment is a little bit difficult. And four weeks of lockdown, took its toll on our spirits.

As you know, in 2019, we have collected almost 500.000,- EUR/USD in voluntary donations from 55.000 donors, and we are grateful for that. Some of the donors were so generous that they send us a few thousand dollars. Thank you very much for this help.

But in order not to loose cash as hell, we need at least to double that amount. Windy.com is becoming more and more popular and offers more and more services. We have to pay an enormous amount for infrastructure to serve millions of users we have, and the amount doubles every year.

Windy Premium

Unfortunately, the coronavirus crisis stopped the economy. It broke our plans to find an income in the B2B segment, so we have decided to launch a Windy Premium subscription (details). It will offer something more for just the price of one lunch.

Bear in mind that Windy.com remains free of charge, fast as hell, and without any advertisement or tracking cookies. And everything, what was for free in 2019, remains free in 2020. Our subscription covers only new functionality that was not present in Windy.com in the past. And of course, our generous donors will get one year of subscription for free (details here).

So far, Windy Premium offers a 1h forecast. We also plan to add a 6h update time for the ECMWF model.

Windy Premium is available on desktop and in our mobile apps version 24.0.0, that are being updated right now.

We need your help

But running the company from our bedrooms and developing this functionality is very difficult. These times are not typical, so please be patient and tolerant of the mistakes we make. We have difficulty in pairing some of the payments with your user account. Some of the problems are caused by not so reliable third party services that collect these payments for us. We are working hard to fix these issues.

Dear Windy.com friend.

The times we are living in are not normal. We are staying at home, and the only risk we are taking now is overeating and gaining more weight. But all the pandemics have ended someday.

I am sure that we will see each other personally sooner that we think. We will see each other on kiting beach, airport, marina or in the mountains and we will have many perfect sessions, flights or sails together.

Stay safe, keep social distancing, and do not catch the coronavirus.

Ivo

Dear users

We prepare slight overhaul of 2 years old "Windy Alerts" feature. If you have any ideas, or thoughts, now is the time to let us know.

And btw, would you like to receive Windy Alerts as push notifications to your mobile device?

Ivo

Weather radar covers just a fraction of the World. But what is happening outside radar range can play sometimes a crucial role for human safety.

That is why we have decided to add worldwide Satellite layer to Windy.

Huge satellite dish, expensive equipment and a half year of development. Our last addition was not simple at all, but we have worked hard.

So far we have a few issues with Satellite layer and we are working hard to fix them.

Nice bonus can be easy to use the animate tool at www.windy.com/animate, that will create a shareable video for your news server or a social account (works only on a desktop computer). Use the video as you wish, just do not forget to add a clickable link to Windy.com.

A lot of people worked on this big feature: I, personally, have bootstrapped CSS classes, Milan, our webGL guru created front end player. But most of the work (approx 80%) was done on the backend. Importing, transformations, delivery. Tomas, Martin, Jakub a Jindra did the job.

Enjoy satellite and stay safe.

While forecast model ECMWF is updated every 12 hours (twice a day), our Windy.com offers 6 hours ECMWF forecast updates (four times a day).

6h ECMWF update time technically means that scientists can feed forecast models with more recent data and produce even better forecasting results than before. Together with a 1h detailed forecast, this innovation brings you a completely new quality level.

6h ECMWF update with 1h detailed forecast is available for our Windy Premium subscribers.

If you are already a Windy Premium user (the yellow crown icon is present in your avatar), you get your 6h updates now. No further action is required.

Otherwise, you can subscribe to Windy Premium in less than 3 minutes, either from your browser at windy.com, or as an app-in purchase in our Android or iOS app by clicking on "Windy Premium."

6h ECMWF update is available for desktop and the latest versions of iOS and Android apps.

This innovation was a heavy duty achievement of all people in our Windy.com tema, mostly backend. So good job boys.

Enjoy our new functionality and stay safe!!

Ivo

Amount of Windy functionality is growing.

Number of Windy visitors is growing.

Therefore we have decided, that our "Windy Premium" subscribers will receive premium technical support on our Windy Community website (at https://community.windy.com).

Our girls are ready during office hours Central European Time (which is almost UTC time).

Every subscriber have "Premium" badge, so we could prioritize the ones, that are subscribers.

The same logic will apply also to new ideas and features.

Opinions of Windy Premium subscribers are much more valuable for us, since without them, we would not be able to pay the bills.

Enjoy this new feature and stay safe.

Ivo

Windy version 19 is here and it brings some major changes:

Summary

• Windy Articles
• Better Distance & Planning tool
• Better possibility to share tracks, positions via URL
• Major mapping library updated to Leaflet 1.4

Changes in detail

• Windy is here to help save lives or property by informing others about severe weather phenomena or state of our Earth's climate. Therefore we are proud to present to you Windy Articles. Windy Articles should help our users and other media to inform about these events, but not only that. We would like to educate others about weather and its dangers. You can use Windy Articles as a publication platform and start writing your articles too, here is how.
• The major mapping library we use was upgraded from Leaflet 0.77 to Leaflet 1.4. This will help mainly our Plugin developers and later on our API users. So if you will have feeling that something is not right, just let us know. Unfortunately we use some fixes in the library so here is our fork of Leaflet that seems to work https://github.com/windycom/Leaflet
• We have brought back the possibility to open Windy and force to display the weather picker in the middle. Just add d:picker to one of the URL params and it should work.
• We have improved the distance & planning tool, so now you can export your track in GPX or XML. And we have also fixed the timeline bug, so your track can cross the timeline.
• A major improvement is also the fact that now you can share or even open Windy with some track, just by constructing the track in URL. The format is simple. Just use semicolon separated coordinates where lat and lon are separated by comma. Example: www.windy.com/distance/lat1,lon1;lat2,lon2;lat3,lon3

A lot of work on this release was done by Ivo, Marek, Milan, Filip and Martin.

So enjoy Windy 19, report any issues and stay safe!

Forecasting weather in mountains is tricky and high-resolution models are a must.

Therefore we are proud to publish a new 2,2 km high-resolution model ICON-D2 from German DWD. It covers the whole German territory, Benelux, Switzerland, Austria, and parts of the other neighbouring countries, especially Czechia, which is where Windy is developed.

All three models: ICON, ICON-EU and ICON-D2 are very good models and provide excellent results, so we are excited to use ICON-D2 for planning our Alpine adventures.

More info about ICON-D2 can be found on its official site: https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/nwp_forecast_data/nwp_forecast_data.html

ICON-D2 is available just on desktop now and we hope to implement the model in Android and iOS apps soon.

Let us know how do you like the new model.

Windy is proud to announce that we have just launched new layer Extreme forecast.

Extreme forecast displays unusually low or high temperature, wind or precipitation, forecasted 7 days ahead. All this is based on heavy duty statistical science, using 20 years climatological data.

So whether you work in agriculture, seek a strong wind for your kiteboarding session or want to avoid extreme temperatures during your holiday, our new extreme forecast will help you.

But not only that. We believe, that 7 days ahead extreme forecast can help emergency services and governments all over the World save lives. And that is one of our main goals here in Windy.

Extreme forecast has values from -100% to 100%. While 50% to 80% (irrespective of sign) generally signify an unusual event, above ±80% means extreme event.

Our Extreme Weather layer is based on ECMWF EFI and we can just say: "You guys (and girls) at Reading, UK do excellent job!"

Here at Windy Extreme Forecast was implemented by Jakub on backend and me personally on frontend.

So enjoy our new Extreme forecast and stay safe

A sharper map and new beautiful colors – this is the main innovation of the new Windy version 14.00.

But not only that.

We bring you the new layer Precipitation type, and two pure experimental layers Fog and Thunderstorms from the ICON GLOBAL model.

Let us know what you think about these data.

Enjoy!

Ivo and the Windy team

Hi, my name is Ivo, and I love the wind!

I am an addicted kiter, helicopter, and jet pilot who seeks the wind, waves, METARs, and powder snow almost constantly. Since programming is my passion, I coded Windyty.com in 2014 as my pet project. The original version was highly inspired by the products from the Swiss company Meteoblue and another project called "Earth", which displayed animated wind particles on the globe. I have completely rewritten the open source codes of Earth and also made an agreement with Meteoblue to use some of their products at that time. And thus Windyty was born (renamed Windy a few years later). My goal is to keep Windy small and fast to be accessible in the most remote locations.

In 2014 Windy was born, under its former name Windyty.

In 2015 the Windy team grew to a few more programmers: Milan and Tomas. We use GFS and NEMS as the main forecast models.

In 2016 we launched Android and iOS mobile Apps and we renamed Windyty to Windytv, which turned out to be a big mistake. As one of the few companies worldwide, we use the ECMWF forecast model, considered the most accurate model available.

In 2017 our team grew to 5 people and we changed the name to Windy with a nice and short address www.windy.com. During hurricane season Windy became the major source of weather information for governments, institutions, and individuals in affected areas, virtually saving lives.

In 2018 we launched a new European weather radar, thunderstorm forecast, and many other major innovations.

In 2019 we launched a new Satellite overlay, route planner, donations, new iOS/Android app Windy Maps, and a "reality vs. forecast" feature. We also integrated webcams.travel and lookr.com websites into the Windy. Our team grew to 15 people.

In 2020 we launched a new Air Quality overlay, optical flow, and enhanced satellite layer. Much better and detailed 1-hour forecast data, updated 4 times a day, became available with the Windy Premium.

In 2021, two new ICON forecast models were integrated - ICON-D2 with local coverage for central and west Europe and ICON Global. Thousands of new air quality stations monitoring primary pollutants worldwide were added from our partners OpenAQ and PurpleAir to fight air inequality.

Several new layers were launched - Tidal currents featuring high-resolution data; the Sea currents dataset was updated; Thermals layer with soaring forecast for glider and paraglider pilots; Drought monitoring layers - Soil moisture, Moisture anomaly, and Drought intensity, monitoring global drought.

We also expanded into the wear OS category and introduced Windy Apple Watch App. The 3D Globe mode was brought back for most layers (desktop only), including the Hurricane Tracker.

In 2022, we launched several new features and improved existing ones. In the beginning of the year, we added a new radioactivity set of stations as a POI overlay and partnered with SaveEcoBot, run by a non-profit organisation SaveDnipro, and obtained a broad spectrum of environmental data sources in Ukraine and offer them in an easy-to-access way to our users and other affected communities for free.

New local models HRRR for the US and ACCESS model for Australia were added, along with a set of layers wet-bulb temperature, UV Index and Solar power.

With release of iOS16, the Windy.com iOS app got LockScreen widgets, which can be placed on the phones's locked screen. A new significant iOS feature.

For the Hurricane season, we launched redesigned and upgraded our Hurricane Tracker and added multimodel forecast & LIVE satellite visualization. Users in the US could also appreciate an improved radar resolution and coverage.

And to make accessing Windy even easier, we introduced social login option that let's you use existing login information from a social network providers like Facebook, Apple, and Google.

Our goal is to provide the best weather forecasting service in the world.

The original "launch" video from 2014:

Windy team as of 2019 in front of our satellite dish

Jobs: Opened positions (in Prague, Czechia, EU) can be found here

Contact: Contact us here in Your Feedback and Suggestions category or in General discussion category so we can share your issue with other Windy users.

You can also contact us on our social media:

Facebook @ windyforecast

Twitter @ windycom

Instagram @ windy_forecast

For email communication, please use info[at]windy.com.

Investor relations: Windy is a private company owned by its founder and employees.

Note: Updated Nov 2022

@jakubvrana New PG mapa plugin is not finished yet

There is no content im embedded DIV and after closing the plugin the items remain in the map

@Suty heliports that report METAR stay on all the time

@vicb Docs repo is very complicated since it uses automatically exported docs from client codes

So there is a lot of scripts etc.

Not so easy

lets have a separate repo

@jakubvrana We have a slack channel #plugins where you can chat with our company.

Shout out if you want in

@jakubvrana Thx will fix

@vicb Yes there is. It is normal git repo with pipelines that publish it

It is hosted in our gitlab and I will ask about access

• Sounding and skew-T diagram is part of core Windy functionality for a long time. If alternative sounding plugin will not appear we can enhance our core sounding to match its functionality
• Expert mode is now DEFAULT (you do not need to activate it)
• New plugin system is state of the art and is NOT compatible with old system. It can not be compared to old system which was barely usable.
• We gave 2 months for plugin developers to rewrite their plugins.

In march 2024 we have launched new major version of Windy (version 42), with new plugin system.

All documentation can be found here: https://docs.windy-plugins.com/

Do you want to publish your new plugin? Let us know here in this thread 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

Unfortunately we do not have any GUI for plugin submission.

Just shout out URL of your plugin and we will make the rest

We will give plugin system one more try

Closing the thread