Best posts made by Ken

It would be great if we could set up an alert for when forecast lightning flash density or CAPE exceeds a certain value of our choosing at a location.

I’d imagine it wouldn’t take too much time to add this capability since it would just be using the same technique as the existing alerts we already use for other parameters such as wind speed, temperature, etc…. except it would just sample the gridpoint value of forecast lightning flash density or CAPE.

Even better would be if such an alert could be triggered when a combination of both lightning (or CAPE) and 500hpa wind speeds (a proxy for shear) exceeds a certain threshold. This could provide a useful heads up on the potential for severe thunderstorms.

@Ondřej-Šutera Ah thanks very much for that! The sounding option doesn't appear for me at first unless I scroll to the right in that section so that's why I didn't see it at first.

@Suty said in animation feature removal:

@ccarawan @Nezolikesrain Possibility of creating your own animation was removed because of high number of bugs there and low usage of this feature on the end of users.

@Suty have you seen all the animations that were still uploaded every single day to https://community.windy.com/topic/8191/your-animations/36468 by the sheer number of people who were still using that feature?

That includes myself. Not sure how that could classify as low usage. Nor the statement that there were a lot of bugs. I only experienced one single issue but was able to work around it.

Even to this day, I personally don't know of any model website that had an animation feature to this standard so it's very disappointing that this has been taken away. Especially considering some of us are premium users paying a fee.

Thanks very much to the Windy team for recently adding ACCESS-C to the list of models for Australia in the desktop version, but can you please extend the 18z runs of ACCESS-C out to its full 42 hours rather than just 36 hours?

The 00z, 06z, and 12z runs only go out to 36 hours but the 18z run was increased to 42 hours a few years ago as a result of forecaster feedback.

Not sure whether this is a bug or it's been intentionally left out but I'll post this question in here just in case it is a bug.

Just wondering where has the ability to long-press on any point on the map to view a model forecast sounding gone after the latest UI update to the app?

Adding precipitation types such as rain vs snow vs freezing rain (perhaps using colour-coding) to work out where snow would be more likely than rain would be great!

@korina oh and sorry, one more suggestion before I forget. Not sure if this deserves a separate thread but it would also be extremely useful if there was an optional setting where alerts extend out to 7 or 10 days.

I know accuracy is lower at that type of range but if it was available as an option that could be turned on or off by premium or more advanced users (while keeping the default alerts to 5 days unless the user forces a change) and adding a disclaimer that skill will be lower, I think it would be a great addition.

I'm a premium subscriber and I'm also unable to use the right arrow key to step forward through the forecast timesteps in the desktop version of Windy.

This occurs in both the Microsoft Edge and Chrome web browsers.

One of my friends who's a premium subscriber is also having the same problem in Chrome.

P.S. Using the left arrow key to step back through time also reveals a bug where it steps back using excessively coarse time intervals e.g. 3 hour increments in the hourly ECMWF forecast with forecast times (those times don't even match up with the model's 03, 06z, 09z, etc times either).

@Korina thanks very much 😁

@Suty is there a need to remove it, considering it's been so useful for so long and that it's never had any problems until now? (none that I've personally experienced anyway)

It would be extremely disappointing if that were to happen.

@idefix37 I think you'll always get those types of people anyway, regardless of how short or long range a forecast is from a model. One of the more classic examples involving thunderstorms and CAPE fields, or localised precipitation on Day 8 from any model.

I think the important part is to add some sort of prominent disclaimer like the one I mentioned in my previous reply cautioning people about that in order to reduce that perception. That's just my view though.

@idefix37 yes I'm well aware of that but as I mentioned in my post, no models are immune to the significant drop-off in useful skill beyond about the Day 5 to 7 mark. GFS just tends to suffer that more than say ECMWF.

Despite this, Windy and many other sites still display ECMWF data out to 10 days to provide a general indication of what may happen. Therefore, I think it should still be an option available to those who are interested (but perhaps with a prominent disclaimer displayed that emphasises the much greater uncertainty at that range for people who may not be aware).

Anyway, just a suggestion that's all. Probably belongs in the "nice to have" category rather than being something essential.

@Ondřej-Šutera thanks for that. Yes I think it'd be a really handy feature to have since I think there are often times that many people want to see how much rainfall is forecast to fall today, tomorrow, the day after, etc.

And a 24 hour max lightning feature would also act as an extremely useful thunderstorm map for today, tomorrow, etc. I think you already use this technique for your wind accumulation option - if so, you could just use the same coding (but for lightning instead) without having to reinvent the wheel.

Just wondering why the no-labels npm package was removed from the list of packages that we could load plugins from?

I noticed shortly before it disappeared that a message came up saying it wasn't authorised.

But it used to be the only way to be able to prevent Windy from displaying forecast temperatures under location names when wanting to view a parameter that didn't have anything to do with temperatures.
In fact, I've seen many people comment that the display of those forecast temperatures on maps such as 10-day rainfall accumulations were confusing because they didn't know when those temperatures were valid for.

Can you please implement the option to be able to toggle the display of those temperatures on and off?

I've seen other people on here ask about this before but when asked why the animation (the "create a timeline animation" feature) was removed, we were given a response about "low" usage and bugs.

When it was pointed out that low usage didn't seem to be a valid reason because many people were still creating animations every day that were getting uploaded to https://community.windy.com/topic/8191/your-animations/36468 , there was no further response.

I also commented that I'd personally only experienced a single bug during the entire time but there was no response to that either.

So in light of the above, could you please clarify why that feature was removed?
As a premium user who pays a fee and especially as someone who also donated money to Windy some time ago when you were appealing for donations, it would be nice to think that such popular useful features wouldn't be removed.

@Suty the usage doesn't look low judging by this link though: https://community.windy.com/topic/8191/your-animations/36468

Maybe compared to the most widely-used features but to me, that link shows there were more than enough people using it to warrant keeping it.

@Caefix I totally agree with you there.

All that time and effort put into the animation feature only for it to be abandoned feels like a big waste to me.

And yes, the animation feature in Windy was much smoother than those in any other website or app I know of. Not only that, those smooth animations could show both both rain and thunder (the lightning symbols) together - something that no other website or app I'm aware of, can do.

Such a unique feature wasted.

It would be good to make the full 16 days of GFS data available in Windy rather than the current 10 days.

I know accuracy is usually a lot lower at that type of range but then again, even the day 5 to 10 period has significantly lower accuracy in most models anyway.

The desktop version of Windy has had 15-day ECMWF and GFS forecasts for the rain and wind accumulation layers for a while now but the mobile app only goes out to 8 days (which is even shorter than the 10 days that it used to be).

When are you planning to make the 15 day forecasts available for the app to align with what that desktop version already has?