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.

https://i.windy.com/a/3/562fkg.mp4?play

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.

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

As we are continuously improving Windy, we’ve never stopped thinking to create – and expand – the 'Weather Radar' feature. However, this service is depended on various data providers, and each country has a different policy regarding the management of these data (see https://on.windy.com/RadarDataGathering).

So far, our radar layer has been covering the USA (including Hawaii and coastal parts of Alaska), South Korea and a couple of islands in the North Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.

After a period of hard work, now we are excited to announce that the long-anticipated Weather radar for a large part of Europe is out! Radar is covering the area from Spain to Finland (see this table). We are gathering radar data for other countries and we will be adding them slowly but surely.

Check this most beautiful composite:

Shortened version of this link: https://on.windy.com/WeatherRadarTesting

Blog post: https://blog.windy.com/help-us-test-our-new-weather-radar-overlay

Download warming stripe for your country at https://showyourstripes.info/

Here in Windy, we believe in science, math and facts.

But not only that. We observe with our own eyes that the climate is rapidly changing. Here in Prague, Czechia in the heart of Europe, we witness the effects of global warming almost every day.

• Our whole country encountered several years of serious drought
• Forests in our country are dying in large volumes due to the drought
• We witness unprecedented torrential rains and winds destroying huge areas of forest
• While we had nice white winters in my childhood, snow becomes an exception these years
• Summer heatwaves have become common, paralyzing people and our nature

And that is just Czechia. Imagine e.g. Quatar that will become uninhabitable before the end of the century.

In order to show others that we take our climate seriously, the climatologist Ed Hawkins (https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins) created easy-to-understand Warming Stripes that display annual average temperatures for the globe (or specific country) from 1850 to 2018

But not everybody believes in science. "Global warming is a hoax," is the argument that I hear sometimes. Or "we cannot do anything with it".

That is totally untrue.

Of course we can do something about it. And we will! Almost all countries signed the Paris Agreement, and they agreed on the 1.5°C - 2°C goal. I am happy to see that governments all over the world are getting on board with this, and that this effort will maybe preserve the conditions of this planet.

Not for ourselves anymore but for our children and grandchildren.

Ed Hawkins's Warming Stripes are the simplest thing that everybody can do, and do it now.

Download stripe for your country at https://showyourstripes.info/ and use these stripes on your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Preferably as a profile picture.

And if you still think Global Warming is a hoax, just watch this video.

I tis not about exlusive you have to set CSS class left-border

Thank you for joining our Windy Stormchasing Network.

This is 2nd prototype of our station.

Your station can be located on your roof, balcony or in your garden. Please do not locate the station close to some other electrical devices (like a fridge).

It is NOT NECESSARY to put your station on the roof or hill, but proper grounding important is.

Your station must be:

• Connected to the Internet
• Powered with 12V - 24V at least 1A
• Properly grounded - very important

You can connect your station via Wi-Fi or via PoE (Power over Ethernet) cable to Internet, which is most convenient method, since you do not need to configure anything and your station is powered and connected to Internet.

If you opt for PoE you need to get Power over Ethernet Injector which is up to 20USD device (check on Amazon), but make sure your PoE Injector is IEEE 802.3af compliant, that means 48V. Some of cheap PoE devices give you just 15V. Ethernet cable should support DHCP. Remember that even the stations connected via PoE must be properly grounded.

If you decide to use Wi-Fi just power the station. The station must blink red once and then should light blue (it takes some time to boot up). Blue light means, that station is not connected to the Internet and acts as its own Wi-Fi Access Point with SSID Blitzstation. Use password detector to log in and at the IP address 10.10.0.1 you will find web Interface, to set-up your station. The set-up page should appear automatically on most of modern phones and laptops and I say again, it takes some time till page will appear.

As soon as your station will be successfully connect to your Wi-Fi, it stops working as an Access Point and it should light green, from time to time.

How to power the station
If you use PoE, your station is powered up. In case of Wi-Fi we can provide you with 12V/1A power. There are many of other power sources, that will give you 12 to 24V, see Amazon offer..

How to ground the station:
Proper grounding is key to good signal. You can use lightning conductor, grounding pin of your electrical power socket or any metal construction, that is grounded will do the job.

Color status codes:

• BLUE - Station failed to connect to Wi-Fi and now works as Access Point
• GREEN time to time - successfully connected to backend
• RED blink - lightning was detected.
• RED for few seconds - lightning was detected, but its info was not sent to backend yet (it is not error)
• RED continuous blinking - a lot of thunderstorm activity, but can be also electrical interference or bad grounding

How to see data from my station:

Go to https://blitz.windy.com and find your own station.

What next?

Share your experience with us. Send us photo of your installation.

@Bbary Mesic max dva

Mathias D. Muller, founder of Swiss company Meteoblue (www.meteoblue.com) is my personal science hero. While enormous amounts of weather geeks remain in research, university or government, he was able to build successful weather company just from scratch. He has pioneered many weather innovations, that inspire weather industry, but mainly us. Like meteograms or multimodel.

Meteoblue provides B2B services to companies worldwide, and their latest achievement are weather data, they provide to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

In this video Mathias explains how the weather forecasted is. But he also demonstrates, why small error in model initialization, can lead to huge uncertainties in weather forecasts.

Although both companies Windy and Meteoblue compete in some aspect, I am proud to get to know Mathias personally. He is one of the brightest and nicest persons I have ever met.

Enjoy the video

Ivo

It was just launched. We will see how the quality of the model will be.

It is not about the model itself, resolution or supercomputer it uses. It is about initialization data, that make forecast model so good.

Ivo

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

@castello-v Well you are very wrong about me. I am very careful driver, driving very slow and also very careful pilot flying safe.

And concerning coronavirus, I do respect all restrictions, but I think the media buzz and social media hysteria just spread fear and does not help at all.

BTW I have personally decided that one of my company will donate equivalent of 4 mil USD to help small Czech companies that were hit by the crisis. I do personally fly a small plane do distribute protective equipment to the hospitals.

Meteoblue is not NEMS. Those are two different datasets.

@Kopansky Neni pravda, ze jsme tady diky prispevovatelum. Bohuzel v roce 2019 jsme vybrali pouze POLOVINU nasich nakladu. Je to sice velika pomoc, ale Windy je zde kvuli investorovi, ktery jeho provoz dlouhodobe dotuje.

@Kopansky Vas prispevek se vztahoval k provozu v roce 2019. Vybrali jsme zhruba polovinu nasich nakladu. V roce 2020 mame naklady vyssi. Pokud mate Windy radi predpadte si Windy Premium.