Reviving an old thread: in the last few days (sorry I cannot be more specific), the place names have changed to something more sensible: either the name of the city, or of the suburb in which I actually am. Much better. So if the dev changed something.... well, it was the right thing to change!! 😁
Posts made by jfmoyen
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
And a last one - travelling on Southern France yesterday, the place names displayed were much more reasonable (villages, I think). It would appear that the issue resides with the database used (OSM extract...), that is somehow poorly tagged specifically in certain parts of the country...
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
I think I can confirm that the place name displayed is the closest place = isolated_dwelling. In the past day or two, the place name displayed has fluctuated beween 2 or three names, each corresponding to one isolated dwelling, and each roughly equidistant from where I'm sitting.
However, having played a bit with QGIS and Voronoi polygons, it appears to be a bit more complex. Apparently, the name displayed is never exactly the name of the closest place. Looks like either my position is incorrect (by > 100 m, which i think is unlikely), or the position of the places is wrong (could happen with projection errors?). Or some of the places are not considered, for some reason (the database used is a weird subset of OSM - we know it is weird anyway as it is ignoring villages and towns in favour of isolated dwellings...).
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
You're welcome, keep up the good job :-)
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
This should interest Windy developers
Well that's why I report it. Should I post it somewhere else ?
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
Further investigation reveals that all the names I have seen correspond to places that have place = isolated_dwelling tag in OSM, and of course a name=XXX tag.
Something like place=city|town|village would be more useful, I think... ;-)Another oddity is that in at least one case, the place name displayed is not the closest place=isolated_dwelling. There are closer places having this tag. So, there must me something I have missed... It may have to do with the details of how Windy connects to OSM (directly to the OSM database, or through some sort of intermediate export...)
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
Yes, Windy uses Open Street Maps as database:
https://community.windy.com/topic/4649/how-to-correct-errors-in-the-base-mapsWell... OSM normally has sensible place names... although I suppose it depends on which OSM "layer" (or tag) is actually used, of course.
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RE: Model vs. forecast
@idefix37 said in Model vs. forecast:
They explain what they do, but the other ones don’t give so much details ... but all of them show a lot of advertising.
As you say. And these are the two main reasons I'm using Windy (well, two of the three actually, the third being a great graphical display): (a) Windy tells me what it is doing and where the data comes from (being a scientist, I tend to be rather particular about knowing how the data is processed !) and (b) advertising is minimal in Windy (even Meteo-France is worth, shame on them....).
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
@idefix37 said in Strange place names in Android widget:
GPS option is useful if you are travelling, but I prefer to use one of my Favorites as starting page (then it save the battery if you don’t use the GPS of your mobile)
Well, yes, that's probably what I'll end up doing while in town. But I do travel a fair bit, so I'll end up using the GPS. Oh, well, it does not matter so much if the name is a bit odd, as long as the forecast is good :-)
Yet as you say, this suggests that the name database is a bit odd... where is it coming from, OSM ? -
RE: Model vs. forecast
@idefix37 said in Model vs. forecast:
But for all weather app you find on internet be sure that the most part (almost 100%) of them do not involve human interpretation.
Thanks for the comment. I'm (mildly) surprised by this statement: if most of the weather apps just feed us the GFS data, how come they differ in what they show ? I have not run systematic tests, but played with 4-5 apps lately and I'm under the impression that they do not show the same forecast. Surely then the apps must do something more ? Interpolating perhaps, with different resolutions ?
(does windy interpolate between grid nodes by the way, or do we just get the straight model output ?)
Also, is there a way to find out what each app is doing, which model it is based on, etc. ? (short answer : probably not, unless they explain on their website and one takes the time to read it all, I presume ?)
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Model vs. forecast
Good morning
Silly question perhaps - but I'm trying to understand how things work, and in particular, how Windy differs from other weather forecast providers (weather underground, google weather.com, national agencies such as meteo-france, etc, etc.).
As far as I understand, the observation data is processed by various (a handful) of agencies, that then generate atmosphere models (ECMWF, GFS, NEMS, AROME, etc). These models are not consumer level products, but rather offer prediction on physical variables such as temperature, pressure, humidity and so on.
This is then translated into user-friendly information ("light rain", "partly cloudy"....) by various proprietary software, that may base their predictions on one or more models, perhaps supplemented by additional observations (WU) or human expertise. This now results in effectively as may forecasts as weather data providers.
Windy, as far as I understand, does not do the second part (interpretation, compilation, etc.) but merely displays (with a gorgeous interface !) the results of the models, and we can even choose which one. Although not quite : there is indeed a "forecast" layer in windy. Where is this derived from ? It this a straight model output, or is there further processing done by windy?
To expand/generalize the question:
Is my understanding, as outlined above, correct?
Any further reading suggestions?
Is there somewhere a comparison between the major operators (BBC, meteo France, WU.....) summarizing where their data comes from and what they do with it ?Thanks !
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RE: Strange place names in Android widget
Thanks for that. Both settings are indeed as you say, windy has access to location and it is set to use GPS.
Further tests : wandering around in town, the widget has successively placed me in a series of unlikely places such as "La Taillée", "La Flache", "Le Fay", "Aux Preynes" and "Le Châtelard" -- all corresponding to the name of small places (farms and hamlets, some of which do not exist any more as they have been swallowed by the suburbs) in a radius of ~ 10 km around the city center.
This is reproducible (i.e. I get the same name every time I go to the same place), and this is consistent (I can map the parts of town corresponding to different names).
It looks like the position is properly defined, but the name displayed is taken from a database that is strange -- it includes minute place names but not the name of bigger cities or villages.
Could it be that these are the names of weather stations (that could have inherited the names of hamlets or former hamlets) ?
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Strange place names in Android widget
Good afternoon,
Just playing with the widget, that I quite like. The only thing that bugs me - it is proposing totally weird place names. For instance as I seat in the middle of Saint-Etienne, a French medium-sized city (specifically 45.4313956,4.3992734), the widget insists on me being at "Aux Preynes", a place name I have never heard before, and apparently the name of a (former) farm, now a sub-urban street some 10 km N from where I sit.Likewise this morning in an other part of town, it was proposing a similarly strange name (true loc: 45.4233932,4.4245558, displayed name "Grange du Bois", the nearest locality with this name being 10-15 km away, and is a hamlet in the middle of nowhere).
If there is a way to get a more sensible place name, I'd appreciate it (of course I can always force the location to be the city itself, Saint-Etienne, but this defeats the purpose a bit...)