Hi all,

From what I can find, this strangely hasn't been recommended in over a year. Rather than revive a dead thread, here's a new one :)

I am a hobbyist severe weather spotter, enthusiast and deeply interested in the theoretical and physical properties that affect severe weather. I'm also an aviation enthusiast. I've spent a lot of time on Windy as a premium user analysing data and predicting for storm severity, plus flying aircraft simulations using real-time weather information.

I've quite recently gotten into understanding the formation of storms in Midwest USA, and I believe Windy.com still has the best set of weather forecasting and observation tools of any other consumer weather application or service. It makes many different models easily available for making advanced (time) decisions based on the probability of weather for many different livelihoods.

However, there are some critically important tools that are completely unavailable through Windy which I would like to suggest.

First being an effective, comprehensive windshear view - which visually highlights the mean direction and intensity of windshear in a given area for an individual model. The best view we have at the moment is standard wind, or Sounding - but with Sounding fixed to a particular location and broad area analysis difficult when cycling manually through wind/altitude levels; I think the Windy development team can do an excellent job of introducing a revolutionary way to visually represent windshear intensity.

The second is the use of Doppler radar, and up-to-date air velocity readings from the use of Doppler radars where this is made available. I'm aware that the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Puerto Rico & Japan have this data available to the public. Some of these sources are available on expensive services such as RadarOmega, while others are available on various websites in a much less friendly format.

The windy interface is much better IMO. I like the windy interface and I like how powerful this software is compared to others. I like the radar view, but would recommend support for frame-stepping with the keyboard where possible. I also believe that the Severe weather alerts preview could be significantly improved to highlight, or allow the customisation of NWS/SPC warnings, alerts and predictions to make viewing multiple warnings over a single area easier to view. Right now, these alerts are shown by a shaded area, but a lot like the news broadcasts in the US, a tornado warning shown in an overlapped red outlined area over the top of the existing severe thunderstorm warning would be more effective at conveying this information. Or, It might be more prudent to have the customisability of these displays to be configurable by the user; to allow them to view severe, danger-to-life severe weather warnings in a format that they're able to understand the best for them.

EDIT: I read in another thread that customisability is against the Windy philosophy, as it is better to just find the best way to display data, and make it happen. This I completely agree with and is why I use Windy as my primary. However, for certain data, such as Severe weather alerts, the current display is not the best available. This could be completely down the the opinion of the individual user, but that's why I think this raises a great argument in favour of customisability here.

TL;DR: Please add an integrated windshear view, high-resolution Doppler reflectance/velocity data, and make improvements to the existing severe weather warnings screen to include better overlapping of multiple warnings, and highlight SPC predictive outlooks.

Many thanks - by the way, I absolutely love the tool!
Steve

@Ørjan-P-Stien I just posted a thread including this exact topic into suggestions - The only good way to visualise this information right now is via RadarOmega which is an expensive, professional grade tool (on desktop). Only basic features are provided free, and desktop/web support is not one of them.

The data is available, and is not considered an issue for state security because I don't think the radars are calibrated, or otherwise capable of picking up the presence of large objects such as planes.

Proper support for single-site radar stations would also make velocity data possible. Sometimes radars feature glitches and other graphical phenomenon - to disable the visualisation of those via single-site selection would be a great improvement.

So it appears we have an answer for this, but missed it. Here's the thread I found on it:

https://community.windy.com/topic/36856/satellite-outage-over-the-north-and-south-america/7

@wmutschler4X This is because you have the suggestion at the top to download the app, but this can be closed off. Does that fix the problem for you?

And no, the mobile app appears to have all the features of the desktop app, albeit in slightly different locations, or in a slightly different format. There's been updates to reduce this difference from my experience.

@Ørjan-P-Stien I just posted a thread including this exact topic into suggestions - The only good way to visualise this information right now is via RadarOmega which is an expensive, professional grade tool (on desktop). Only basic features are provided free, and desktop/web support is not one of them.

The data is available, and is not considered an issue for state security because I don't think the radars are calibrated, or otherwise capable of picking up the presence of large objects such as planes.

Proper support for single-site radar stations would also make velocity data possible. Sometimes radars feature glitches and other graphical phenomenon - to disable the visualisation of those via single-site selection would be a great improvement.

Hi all,

From what I can find, this strangely hasn't been recommended in over a year. Rather than revive a dead thread, here's a new one :)

I am a hobbyist severe weather spotter, enthusiast and deeply interested in the theoretical and physical properties that affect severe weather. I'm also an aviation enthusiast. I've spent a lot of time on Windy as a premium user analysing data and predicting for storm severity, plus flying aircraft simulations using real-time weather information.

I've quite recently gotten into understanding the formation of storms in Midwest USA, and I believe Windy.com still has the best set of weather forecasting and observation tools of any other consumer weather application or service. It makes many different models easily available for making advanced (time) decisions based on the probability of weather for many different livelihoods.

However, there are some critically important tools that are completely unavailable through Windy which I would like to suggest.

First being an effective, comprehensive windshear view - which visually highlights the mean direction and intensity of windshear in a given area for an individual model. The best view we have at the moment is standard wind, or Sounding - but with Sounding fixed to a particular location and broad area analysis difficult when cycling manually through wind/altitude levels; I think the Windy development team can do an excellent job of introducing a revolutionary way to visually represent windshear intensity.

The second is the use of Doppler radar, and up-to-date air velocity readings from the use of Doppler radars where this is made available. I'm aware that the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Belgium, Puerto Rico & Japan have this data available to the public. Some of these sources are available on expensive services such as RadarOmega, while others are available on various websites in a much less friendly format.

The windy interface is much better IMO. I like the windy interface and I like how powerful this software is compared to others. I like the radar view, but would recommend support for frame-stepping with the keyboard where possible. I also believe that the Severe weather alerts preview could be significantly improved to highlight, or allow the customisation of NWS/SPC warnings, alerts and predictions to make viewing multiple warnings over a single area easier to view. Right now, these alerts are shown by a shaded area, but a lot like the news broadcasts in the US, a tornado warning shown in an overlapped red outlined area over the top of the existing severe thunderstorm warning would be more effective at conveying this information. Or, It might be more prudent to have the customisability of these displays to be configurable by the user; to allow them to view severe, danger-to-life severe weather warnings in a format that they're able to understand the best for them.

EDIT: I read in another thread that customisability is against the Windy philosophy, as it is better to just find the best way to display data, and make it happen. This I completely agree with and is why I use Windy as my primary. However, for certain data, such as Severe weather alerts, the current display is not the best available. This could be completely down the the opinion of the individual user, but that's why I think this raises a great argument in favour of customisability here.

TL;DR: Please add an integrated windshear view, high-resolution Doppler reflectance/velocity data, and make improvements to the existing severe weather warnings screen to include better overlapping of multiple warnings, and highlight SPC predictive outlooks.

Many thanks - by the way, I absolutely love the tool!
Steve