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!

@triggernometry @auweatherwatcher @emilyyyZzz They are girls and we call them so. We use such naming in common language. We do not have anonymous helpdesk, but we have Kori and Petra ...and unlike Alexa or Siri, they are real ;-)

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.

@MolnAir Hi, we are sorry, this was a fault on our server, not a problem on ECMWF side. We had difficulties with data importing, so there remained the old forecast. Everything is up and running now.
On Premium subscriptions: we are trying to find a balance between keeping most of the features free and giving good added value to premium users. A year ago there were just donations (no added value for our contributors). This year we came up with better temporal resolution of the forecasts and it is likely that we will be adding more premium features or maybe shifting some existing features to premium to keep the product attractive for our subscribers. We are developing Windy for people and we are happy that a part of them (like you) is willing to pay for it. Thank you!

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

@Alvarnegro Hi! Yes we are planning to add such features. Are you a paraglider?

@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.

@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.

@nosko Ok, which forecast is better? We can compare and if you know about some better model than the ECMWF / ICON / GFS for Belarus we can try to get the data for Windy.

@p-lis Embedded widget is for free also for commercial use.

@p-lis Hi, we are happy that you want to embed Windy to your sites. Yes, it is for free, but the logo must remain visible and clickable. Could you send us links to sites when it is finished?

Images are available again. We had problem with our backend services, it is fixed now.

@massimo Thank you for your post, we are investigating it. I started a new thread for this case: https://community.windy.com/topic/16985/japan-radar-outage

Japan radar images are not available. We're looking into the problem. New information will be published here.

@llxc We are investigating it and it seems there is some problem on the ECMWF side: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/service-status
We will create status topic in community and keep you informed about the situation.

@skysailor Ok, heights forecast by Windy are AMSL, but it should not make such difference - Lasham/UK is 570ft.

@skysailor Thank you for very detailed feedback. We will look at it. One more question - do you use ECMWF or ICON?
About evaluation: we can easily compare forecast of cumuli with satellite imagery. Height of thermals is more complicated. We will probably use igc files or soundings.

@skysailor Hi, thank you for the feedback! Could you please provide more specific data? Which place/date and how big is the difference?