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Comment by jackschultz | Hacker News Reader

Interesting note, I play a lot of golf competitively, and they've basically recently allowed players in tournaments to use phones (obviously players don't do that much or if at all, concentration and all that).

But the one specific rule is that players can't use their phones to check the weather, and even more specifically the wind direction. Wind makes a huge difference on the course, and being able to know the exact direction of the wind where the ball is flying would be really helpful. Other part is being able to know if the wind shifts during the round. Before you start you can check the wind direction, but if that changes, you could be out of luck. This seems like a perfect golf aide, so much to the point where it's a penalty in a tournament.

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Even the best models commonly available will only operate at a 3km resolution, which realistically isn't that much more useful than a 10km or 20km grid for ageostrophic winds (wind not affected by the ground). A model might show you have 8kt winds out of the SSE, but things like water, treelines, hills, etc. could have a large impact on a golf ball.

It'd be easy enough to look at the forecast for a 3km model like the HRRR, but the challenging part would be guessing at how the various features on a course interact with that forecast.

Right, I talked about this below, but really the main thing is just knowing the which of the 16 labeled directions the wind is coming from, and then checking back every few holes if possible, and then make arrows on the course map with that overall direction.

And yes, trees and hills totally have an impact, but the main impact is the difficulty of having a very in tune knowledge of where the wind above the trees and hills is blowing. If you're hitting a normal full shot, the ball flight will be (usually) only affected by the standard wind direction.

Again of course, there are gusts that make that difficult to time a shot, and ball flight and shot type make a difference as well, but knowing and trusting the overall direction would be really helpful.

I race sailboats competitively, and obviously wind direction and speed affects the outcome even more.

Electronically, in most classes of boats you're allowed to get any information that's available to anyone (i.e. you can hit any public website, but you can't call your local weatherman to ask his opinion). But really, there's not that much information available for day races (long distance races are a different animal)

One of the things that's become common over the last 10 years or so it to use a forecasting service. Basically you talk with a meterologist each morning or perhaps a few days in advance and they let you know what they expect to happen. You end up with statements like, "If you see big puffy clouds coming in, you should expect the wind to shift to the right of about 30 degrees shortly. But if the clouds don't come in, or you see flat ones, you won't get the shift until the puffy clouds fill in."

They're pretty good at forecasting what will happen over a large area or a day, but for really small areas (a few square miles) or really short periods, they can't be that accurate because the movement of the systems varies in speed and direction too much over short periods.

But try a forecasting service, it really can be helpful to know what's happening around you. Around $100 a day is reasonable last time I did this.

It does not seem precise enough to give you localized condition on that scale. I tried zooming in to see how it was reporting wind and waves I can see from my current location, and there was simply no data once you got down to a range of a few miles.

A range of few miles doesn't make that big a difference on the golf scale. Really, the only deep down information I'd want to have is like down to the 16 directions on a compass. These courses have maps of the holes and you're able to draw arrows on the map of the general wind.

The key part of this site seems like I'd be able to check back every few holes to see if it's shifted enough to change the arrow. When checking for a local course, I can see enough to where I'd trust it, but then again, having more correct wind information would be better.

> exact direction of the wind where the ball is flying would be really helpful

When I did tournaments we would look at the flagstick, trees and also release blades of grass.

I could see near exact speeds helping (could make the difference between putting for birdie vs chipping from off the green) but not any more of an advantage than a rangefinder. Do they let you use a rangefinder in your tournaments or no?

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