Question: Why reported wind speed of hurricane is much higher than value forecasted by Windy?

Answer: Windy displays ECMWF or GFS global forecast model. Neither of them is capable to predict exact peak values.

Reasons:

1. Modeling: Numerical model computes grid that has finite resolution in both space and time (~10km in space horizontally, ~100-1000m vertically, ~1-6h in time). Peak values are smoothed, because of coarse grid resolution.
2. Analysis of input data: Calculations are based on measurements. They come from stations, radars, satellites and other sensors. These sensors are not always reliable, so extremal measurements can be considered as errors during data assimilation and thrown away to avoid damaging the computation.

Conclusions:

1. Numerical models are not good at prediction of local extreme values and phenomena. Examples: tornadoes, convective storms, hails, single convective clouds, single orographic clouds, extreme wind speed in storms or hurricanes.
2. Numerical models are good at prediction of averege and "smooth" values. Examples: average wind in last 3 hours, temperature, humidity, pressure field.

Altitude and coverage of convective clouds (cumuli) ...I will implement it one day :-) but if there are more people wanting this, please upvote!

This topic seems to be explosive. I understand that many people are against
"global warming religion", but think about it pragmatically.
If we call "Warming" the situation when "climate is changing rapidly and it is caused by mankind",
then there are 4 options:

A. Warming is not true and we believe it is not true
B. Warming is not true and we believe it is true
C. Warming is true and we believe it is true
D. Warming is true and we do not believe it is true

If we want to do any action we should behave pragmatically, economically, rationally.
Consider the damage control. There are 2 faults among these options: B. and D.
If B. is our reality we may waste our energy and money uselessly and our children will laugh at us in future.
If D. is our case, it means that we are borrowing our wealth from future generation, our children will hate us.
From this point of view the "panic" about Warming is completely understandable.

If we think about what is caused by humans: Daily weather is caused by humans. If you live in big city,
the temperature, moisture, evaporation, albedo, everything is massively influenced by human and you can measure it.
If you look at countryside from air, you can see that the terrain is completely changed by human. It also affects daily weather.
People have power to change the landscape, to destroy or plant whole forests.
Greenhouse hypothesis is about composition of atmosphere. I do not want to judge whether that hypothesis is true
or false. But people are moving fossil fuel from land to atmosphere. That is fact. One day all fossil fuel
will be moved from land to atmosphere, it will not magically disappear.
50000kg of airliners fuel means exactly 50000kg of waste. It is taken from land and put to air circulation.

Rising temperature is reality. Question is: Is it caused by our technical revolution? Nobody is sure, but there is correlation.
Do not cry, do not panic, just think about A, B, C, D.

@meteo-GR Now it is accessible through the testing interface only, but is scheduled for release during this week.

@fx-eddh said in Windy offers Sounding Forecast:

Stüve to Skew t-log p

Yes, we are considering switching between these "coordinate systems".

Hi Jeff,
thank you for the feedback. It is not possible now.
Maybe we will consider this in some future release.

@btschumy Hi, the whole composite is created from multiple images from multiple satellites. This is boundary of two satellite images (from Goes West and Goes East). Infra composite is almost perfect, but visible composite suffers many problems especially due to reflections and refractions of the light. We will focus on this in future, but unfortunately some of these visual artifacts can not be completely removed.

@p1rate Hi! Symbols illustrate wind speed and direction.
See this picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_map#/media/File:Wind_barbs.gif
How can this help you to prepare flight? It depends on what kind of flying you do (thermal flying / ridge flying) and on the terrain where you want to fly.

According to ECMWF and GFS models it seems that Typhoons Soulik and Cimaron will simultaneously make landfall in highly populated areas in the following days. The first one in Korea, the second one in Japan.

Typhoon Soulik is already in range of local radars:

@tobiasv @idefix37
Dear Tobias, you are right that our station is offline, we are investigating why it is so.
It will be operational soon.
As regards the data access: We were waiting for the Blitzortung station for a really long time, more than a year.
When we received one and installed it, we had already developed most of the system to display lightnings. We were disappointed when we found out that we can not use real time data in any way and that only Blitzortung or Lighntingmaps are allowed to use it.
We were contributors of Blitzortung and felt like we have right to use the data.
But it seems that Blitzortung data is no real open data as we had expected.
I admit that it is your business, since you have ads on your page, and under such conditions we are willing to make a deal with you, to buy the data via some API or whatever.
Yes, we are non-profitable so far, but we also have a budget and can pay you for the data access.
Many people all around the world want to see real-time lightnings on Windy,
but if you keep your attitude in a style that there is no chance to get your agreement, we will of course stop using Blitzortung data and must find some other solution. :-(

@Bbary Fixed, https://community.windy.com/topic/12813/copernicus-eu-data-outage

Solved ~ 2020-07-09 12:45 UTC

There are issues with migration to the new Copernicus CAMS-EU data interface, so there are missing PM2.5, NO2, Surface Ozone parameters for Europe on Windy.com and in mobile applications. Fix should be released in one or two days.

@Tomber42 Hi, thank you for your feedback. We have similar issues in other languages. It is hard to say which label should be translated and which not. As Idefix said, we are using third party database (OSM) for the labels. Are Pilsen or Prag good for you? Would you also be satisfied with Plzeň or Praha? In our language we have translation Benátky for Venezia. Many czech people do not know what Venezia is. On the other side there are many problematic translations like Solnohrad for Salzburg. This translation is not used anymore and sounds very old-fashioned.

@ekostogorov The sounding should be there, but not the Skew-T variant. Hopefully in the future.

@jpsurin It is already available as "Cloud base" layer.

@jonwilloughby Hi, you are right, see: https://apps.ecmwf.int/codes/grib/param-db?id=228057
But to be honest, these numbers probably do not fit with real lightning count in the specific storm.
According to https://www.ecmwf.int/en/newsletter/155/meteorology/promising-results-lightning-predictions , part "Lightning parametrization", the result is normalized by constant α "where α is a tunable coefficient, currently set to 37.5 to match the annual global mean flash rate". So it is expectable that forecasted annual lightning count may be correct, but in the specific storm? who knows...
Nevertheless the Thunderstorm forecast is not intended for calculating flashes, but to predict locality, probability and severity of storms. And as you can see on case of Crew Dragon launch, the boys from ECMWF predicted that storm very well :-)

@Ashishweb Hi, the visualisation is a mosaic of multiple satellite images. At the ~85E meridian there is a boundary between two of them. It is hard to glue the images together. In some cases it is not possible at all.
Images from visible part of the light spectrum are prone to lighting artifacts like scattering in atmosphere or reflections. Especially when one satellite is "looking to the sun" and sees only scattered light near the horizon. Then the picture is completely yellowish on Windy. The other satellite sees the same place from much different angle and in such case does not suffer from the actual light scattering. If you want more homogeneous image, try switching to INFRA or INFRA+. There are almost no lighting artifacts in the images, because they contain only emitted light (which is radiated in all directions with the same intensity) and therefore can be glued together quite well.

@johnfmejia Hi, it can happen. Interpolation algorithm is not able to detect motion correctly in all cases. Problems can occur especially when multiple layers of clouds are present or when small clouds are quickly appearing or disappearing. If it is your case, please try to turn-off "Smooth satellite animation" in the settings.

@Gkikas-LGPZ Thank you. It is definitely a bug. We will look at it as we get to rendering a new version of the labels.