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!

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

Is 35°C too hot for temperature in Prague, in the middle of Europe, today? Yes, at this time it certainly is. But 35°C in Dubai can be a normal temperature today. But what is normal and what is extreme weather at this time of the year for any particular location in the World?

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 (check official docs) 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

https://www.windy.com/annotation/5d09ef386590870019ed08a8

https://www.windy.com/annotation/5d09efb66590870019ed08a9

All the satellite images out there, are delivered in 5 to 15 minutes steps.

But can you imagine seamless, real time satellite imagery. It is technically impossible, yet we have tried to do our magic. Tomas, Jindra and Milan came with the concept of interpolation of missing images, that display clouds movement in "real-time" (quotes are necessary, since it is not real-time in fact). But not only that, satellite images are much more detailed and sharper, then in previous version.

See the difference in the video, it is amazing :)

To save bandwidth or spare your notebook battery you can switch off this feature off in Menu > Settings by disabling Smooth satellite animation switch.

This new feature is available on desktop only and we are still not sure, if we port this to our mobile apps, where bandwidth can be a limiting issue.

So enjoy new satellite and stay safe.

Ivo

@utschy iOS/Android. Which phone, which version of OS

We, at Windy, hate advertisement probably the same as you do. But someone will have to pay the bills.

Here are some facts:

• Number of our visitors grow 100% every year

• We distribute more and more weather data, so our infrastructure costs grows even more than 100% a year

• We innovate like a crazy

• If 3% of our regular users will subscribe to Windy Premium we will not have to put advertisement on Windy at all.

• In order not to go bankrupt we need to put advertisement on our site in 2021.

If you want to have Windy without advertisement (only around 1.8 USD a month), please subscribe to Windy Premium and we will clear all the advertisement for you.

If you do not want to become Windy Premium user, and still feel offended by this advertisement, please give us some hint and ideas.

How to have Windy without the advertisement and not to go bankrupt.

Any ideas are welcome.

Ivo

Webcams.travel (which was absorbed by Windy.com later on) was provider of weather webcams for Norwegian weather institute for many years and for free.

Unfortunately, the new version of their weather website https://www.yr.no/ does not contain weather webcams, which they explain in their FAQ document as "we have lost supplier":

This is not true. Our API endpoints are the same and for yr.no free of charge. Yr.no just made business decision, that they do not want to display weather webcams to its users. That's it.

The good news is, that all the webcams can be found at: www.windy.com/webcams

Please spread the word among all Yr.no users, that their webcams can be found at our website, or in our iOS/Android app.

When it comes to weather and safety, there is no room for turf wars.

Use our weather webcams and stay safe.

Ivo

Ok, well noted. We try to schedule it next year.

@yves70 Fog is substituted from ICON forecast model

Is the model good? In EU we have also high resolution local models, but their accuracy is sometimes really bad.

Can we see some model evaluation?

@55phil For small amounts (below 5 USD a month) , the Apple/Google charge us huge transaction fee, therefore we will receive only substantially smaller amount.

We have not set the date for implementation of ads yet.

We need 3% of our users to become Windy Premium subscribers, to pay our bills. if this happen, we do need to add ads to Windy at all.

BTW: Windy Premium users will have Windy.com & our aps WITHOUT advertisement.

@Korina Korina, can you create separate thread with step 2 step explanation, how to gift subscription.

@Nyxtorm Hmm we have to automate changelog publication somehow