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Tomas

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!

@Edgington Hi, this is probably because of different calculation of both values.
Cloud base is directly taken from ECMWF parameter called "ceiling". It is height (above model orography i.e. AGL) of cloud layer covering more than 50% of the sky. It estimates height where you can expect "significant clouds". Detailed description is here: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/FCST/43r1+new+parameters%3A+Ceiling
On the other side the grey meteogram is calculated from relative humidity. It can be explained as a distribution of water in the atmosphere. The height in the meteogram is in pressure levels. km/ft values are only rough estimation and they are AMSL. I admit that this can be confusing.
Possible explanation of the difference: There could be signigicant humidity (almost 100%), so there are drawn clouds in meteogram, but the cloud coverage according to ECMWF is less than 50%, so the ceiling is considered to be higher.
In such strange case it is better to look also in cloud maps, which can give you better overview. However, if the location is in the mountains then the values can be misleading, because model orography is very rough.

@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.

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

@fx-eddh said in Windy offers Sounding Forecast:

Stüve to Skew t-log p

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

Today in the Czech Republic we remind people who passed away. So thank you @petra-pik again for everything! You will be always remembered in Windy team.

@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!

@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.

@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?

@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.

Hi, we are planning to add some more features, but not everything. The way we are walking is not a detailed flight calculator for questions like "how many points can I get tomorrow with my specific glider?", but rather "is it going to be good weather tomorrow?". For better insights we are planning to add/improve meteograms for points or routes and also improve sounding. These tools should work well together and be part of whole Windy ecosystem with all its features and layers.
Would you for example be interested in maximum climb displayed as isolines?

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:

Hi @Jakub-Smitka, that is the point - we are moving to Premium such features that are not vital, but many people want them. Since we removed just last 3 days of forecast, Windy remains 95% usable for free users. As you indicated you can not make any decision based on 10-day forecast, because it is totally unreliable. So if you need forecast and weather tools for your planning and decision making, you can use Windy as before and pay nothing for it. In the previous version of Premium many people were cancelling with comments: "There is no difference between Free and Premium. I am happy with Free version. Buying Premium is just like a donation...And so on." To have a sustainable income, we need to give more value for Premium. If we just wanted to get money, we could have closed the free version completely, but we didn't. We did not remove any feature that is necessary for the forecasting, we just removed feature that is very popular.

@Finlet-AU We changed it in the last update so you do not see nowcasting unless you click to "red bar".

@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. :-(