https://community.windy.com/topic/10304/intergration-of-the-weather-channel/2

@zdawg801 – The gray areas represent cloud. Darker grays = cloudier skies. Since this is a time series, the "edges" of these shapes from left to right represent cloud formation and dissipation.

The numbers show the cloud level. The "h" should really be "hPa" – this is atmospheric pressure, which decreases with height. Then km is just kilometers, and ft is feet. "FL" means flight level, where FL180 = 18,000 ft, or FL300 = 30,000 ft.

So for example, at 1500 Monday, there is broken/overcast cloud with a cloud base of 12,000ft; this cloud is deep enough to stretch up past the 30,000 ft mark; it's giving 1.8mm of rain per hour, and it appears to be thickest at the level of 500hPa, which equates to 5km, which equates to 18,000ft.

Make sense?

What exactly are you missing? You can get, say, geopotential height isolines at any level, overlaid on any raster layer:

More advanced things like, say, vorticity advection, aren't available; but I think Windy would become too convoluted for the average user if too much was added. The only thing I'd like to see would be the ability to get the contoured isolines overlaid on a different level to the raster layer. (Then you could look at 300hPa geopotential height on an 850hPa temperature layer, for example, allowing diagnosis of thermal advection.)

@Gkikas-LGPZ – You've answered your own question there: it's not available in the menu because it hasn't been tested enough to ask the Windy guys to add it to menu!

So thanks for the feedback, this is a bug for sure. Could you tell me your operating system and browser please? I'll hunt it down if I can find some time :)

The blue bars? This is just precipitation rate (blue for rain as per the legend on the left) – so 0.2mm/hr of rain is forecast at 00:00 on Monday in your image. Cloud base is just below that, e.g. forecast cloud base is 23,000ft at 00:00 on Monday. Change the units by clicking on them.

@Dilees – Apologies if I've misunderstood your question; but I think you might be misinterpreting what the visualization acutally does.

I'm sure you realise that Windy's particle animation moves more slowly in areas of low speed relative to windier areas. The "tail" of the particle is also longer where it's windier. If I read this right, you want the wind to move at the pace of the "real" wind. But you can't – you wouldn't see it move.

Imagine a frontal system postitioned over the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, which is moving eastwards with a speed of 15kt. If you were in the Azores, you might experience a wind of 15kt which is noticable. But by the time the frontal system has reached the Bay of Biscay 2000km away, 3 days will have passed. So basically, if Windy visualised a particle within this airflow, the particle would take 3 days to move across the screen.

The particle animation therefore appears to have winds that flow THROUGH features like weather fronts, which makes no meteorological sense... but it gives a great "feel" for where the stronger winds are and how they curve on a planetary scale.

Does that make any sense? I might be way off base, please feel free to clarify your question :)

@vicb – Cool, thanks for the link! I knew this type of thing was on the way... I wonder when/if it'll make it to production, and who'll be providing it first (will Google follow through?). The problem of convective cell generation and dissipation has always been the tricky part, not to mention identifying the cells themselves.

Machine learning really is the future with weather prediction, but I also feel like people think it's currently further along than it really is!

@idefix37 – Don't want to go off on too much of a tangent from the OP, but I really wonder how NOAA deal with this step-change between the 13km and the 22km version of GFS... If one were to simply downscale the 13km version, that would really mess with the way the parametrization works... If only the documentation was less opaque :(

It's certainly possible that Windfinder just pays for the 13km simulations. There must be SOME reason why people still use them hehe :)

Actually, a quick correction to that statement @idefix37; the GFS actually does run at about 13km resolution, but NOAA only provide 0.25° for free. They also do a 0.5° version, but Windy uses the 0.25° grid (23-28km at USA latitudes maps to 0.25°, not 0.5°).

@elninohm, you might have noticed that Windy is a free resource; so the answer to your question is no... we've been more than spoiled already, being gifted ECMWF data for free :)

Infra+ is cloud top temperature. We had a chat about it here:
https://community.windy.com/topic/10107/new-satellite-map-enhancements/33