I just bookmark Windy as https://www.windy.com/-Weather-radar-radar or whatever.

@TomSlavkovsky – Tom, seems there's already some confusion about INFRA+, even on this thread; labelling it as Cloud Top Temperature (or linking to a description of what it is) seems important to me. Clarity has always been Windy's strength.
Also I'm realising now that we probably can't change units with it because they're the only available units. I'd advocate a touch of javascript give us Celsius instead. That way, it'll also be clearer that we're looking at temperature.

@TomSlavkovsky looks great :) Personally I prefer the new colour scale. But as @Gkikas-LGPZ, says change units isn't working for me either – plus, degrees Kelvin really shouldn't be the default (Celsius should). Speaking of, it's probably unclear to the general user what infra+ actually is (cloud top temperature, right?). Perhaps this could be labelled somewhere?

@Arqui26 Has entendido mal el comentario, se trata de cómo se crean las imágenes en mosaico :)

I'm in Valencia, Spain, at the moment, and things are getting interesting (convection-wise) :) Looking ahead though, I'm seeing a pretty an odd shape the precipitation field on Saturday the 14th around 1200Z in ECMWF for the 20190912T0000Z run.

This is likely more an issue with Windy's contourf functionality than the EC data – a great example of the limitations of using contouring for precipitation, especially showers and convective cells. That's not to say that anyone else does it better than Windy, but it makes me wonder if there's a better way...

Any opinions?

Can any Windy moderators tell me what contouring package Windy uses? @TomSlavkovsky @ivo @Marienka

John

Nice one @mhaberler, sounds like you know your stuff! The Föhn effect is a really tricky beast to forecast; actually, pretty much all mountain-based phenomena in general are a nightmare to get right. As people rely more and more on the models, the forecasters who can actually understand and predict this stuff become a dying breed... But that's a general thing, and for the marjoity of these phenomena, it's only the pilot that will ever see it, not the weather models, and not the observations network. So historical data wouldn't be much help anyway right? But then again, the charts can certainly show you the right conditions for these things to form. If pilots had a medium to add in local scale phenomena that they saw on a flight to a historical chart, that would be pretty cool. That way, they could reference what they saw when that setup reoccurs. I'm getting more and more interested in creating this myself...

By the way, with the aviation briefs, what's the "aviation briefing website"? Could you give me a link? Also, I just spent some time on working on my skewT platform tephigrams.org over the weekend, some vertical profiles, if it helps at all.

Thanks for the comments @mhaberler. You've hit on an important concept here. Is there such a thing as a "historical weather forecast"? You seems to be alluding to model data. The important question is this – could you have avoided a dangerous situation if you had looked at the forecast an hour before flying vs. 3 days before flying? Which model run is the one to reference?

We've talked about creating more detailed surface analyses before. But with an investigation, for example, you would need to know what forecast data you had available at the time (and what's its lead time was). Not only that, but which model. Weather forecast models are an extremely fluid thing, and are just a tool. This is why, when stakes are high, companies shell out for private forecasting companies who employ real forecasters. And with a proper accident investigation, it's usually time to do that. I can't speak to other modelling centres, but I know the UK Met Office archive all their UM forecasts (which cost an obscene amount in storage), so that they can be referenced later.

But, if we're just taking about your own learning, it sounds like a surface analysis would do the job nicely. Surface analyses are traditionally just synoptic charts (isobars and fronts), but I think we can do better. I may just start working on something like that myself (though with one year left, I should probably make a stab at starting to write my PhD thesis).

Let me ask you this @mhaberler, what level of detail would you need to "see if you could have avoided a situation"? Highs and lows? Surface winds? Gusts? Winds at all levels? Precipitation? Visibility? As gridded data or just at airfields? I have some aviation forecasting experience, but we were very focused on just our own airfields, and the WAFC/LOLAN guys used to take care of the rest.

I'd say that understanding the English idiom "all Greek to you" makes you more than qualified to write something @Gkikas-LGPZ!

@garlandz I feel I should mention again (third time this thread!) – I don't work for Windy! This thread is a discussion between users :)

Ah well here's a coincidence @garlandz; looks like the guys at Windy just added this!
https://community.windy.com/topic/8710/windy-predicts-extreme-wind-temperature-and-rain