About Windy (2018) | Hacker News Reader

About Windy (2018)

community.windy.com

99 pointsohmyblock34 comments

I’ve been using Windyty since it’s launch. As a sailor, the visuals were extremely critical in planning passages. Where we could plan down to the minute of when to make course and sailplan changes.

Now we’re on land and I’ve introduced to it to my colleagues. While I can read weatherfaxes, gribs, and navtexes it would take a full for your average layperson to read and interpret that data. Windy makes it very easy for anyone to conceptualize weather models and create their own predictions.

"Where we could plan down to the minute of when to make course and sailplan changes."

As a racing sailor I get that you can PLAN when to do these things, but Windy isn't giving you info from models accurate enough for this to be optimal. It just make you feel good and the picture are pretty.

If you have wind, polars, currents, and sea states you should have a good grasp at where you're boat will be and at what time.

Also, the closer you are to your start time the better the model. If I go sailing in the next 30 minutes, the model is really damn accurate.

at ~9km resolution they may be accurate but I doubt you can plan things down to the minute or even have any certainty of what weather conditions to expect near shore where terrain will greatly affect the flow of 10m winds. also Windy only works over a strong network connection so during actual passages it isn't really that helpful (compared wx gribs which can typically be downloaded over ham radio)

All that being said, Windy is an amazing product, and definitely a boon for visualizing model data and making that accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection!

source: thousands of miles of single-handed ocean sailing and I also handle wx model data daily at my job.

This clearly is not sufficient for inland racing but I can absolutely see how it would be for sailing long distances.

However it would be really cool to see something like this at a much more detailed resolution. I've been using this model for currents for the last 14 years: http://hudson.dl.stevens-tech.edu/maritimeforecast/maincontr... It would be more legible if it used windy's visualizations.

As a paragliding pilot, this is one of the best weather resources for me (along with https://meteo-parapente.com/). Fantastic visualizations, fantastic data sources.

Note: Depending on your region, it might be a good idea to compare forecasts of different weather model. GFS with its 22km resolution is not well-suited for forecasts in the mountains, where the model may completely "overlook" an entire (large) valley. Weather phenomena like the Föhn are also not modelled well. ECMWF with 9km resolution is often better. In the alps, I've had good experience with NEMS (by Meteoblue) as well as COSMO by Meteoswiss (which is not (yet?) available on Windy).

Overview over the prediction models: https://community.windy.com/topic/12/what-source-of-weather-...

My go to weather app, along with Dark Sky. Can't say enough good things about it. Constantly updated with new, useful features.

There's something to be said for a software company not taking a ton of VC money, hiring hundreds of people, and shutting down in 3-4 years. From the last photo they have a ~10 person team.

It is indeed a cool project. However I am interested how they make money? Their apps seem to have IAPs, or how does their business-model work?

The project was started (and still being partly coded by) one of the most successful Czech internet entrepreneurs, currently ~16th wealthiest Czech out there, his fortune estimated at ~$.7bn, so this venture seems to be self funded.

I can dig up an interview I read with him (in Czech), but I can't recall him talking about the financial side of things. He rarely talks to the press, so it's hard to come by this sort of information.

That's kind of amazing. Is it common for wealthy entrepreneurs to create self-funded projects like this?

Sounds like some kind of internet-philanthropy...

They crowdsourced something like 500k EUR this year too

If you're on the webpage, under the top left corner hamburger menu the first item is "Donate". Not sure how they've done this year, their goal listed is $550k but for me it shows 0% which I find hard to believe in December. I blame my browser lockdowns.

They also have apps with in-app purchases to donate as well.

My preferred weather widget on Android (Meteogram Pro) links out to Windy if you tap the top center of the widget, it's very handy.

50,773 users already donated: 448,744 EUR

https://i.imgur.com/hsxCcsW.png

GUI-wise Windy is nice, but for a good forecast I prefer https://www.meteoblue.com, e.g. https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/multimodelense...

Although the wind map of meteoblue looks good, too: https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/windmap/zurich...

The author is also the founder and owner of a local Google-like company (search, email, maps, media, etc.), that's where he gets the funding for Windy.

And their maps are far superior to Google if you are looking for a map experience. I.e. you want to see a map, understand it, use it. With Google you get a grey blob of nothing where you can see a plotted route and reviews for your destination. It's useful, but very different.

Indeed. Topographic maps with route planning for cross-country skiing, road biking or mountain biking. (in addition to usual car navigation). Offline capabilities, weather conditions along the route, on-line cameras etc.

https://www.windy.com/maps?map

Meanwhile, Windy's maps use OpenStreetMap data, but don't give OSM the required attribution.

That's against OSM's licence and seriously not cool.

They will fix it: https://community.windy.com/topic/3353/map-correction/15

They have not fixed it for almost 3 years - except for a really really tiny attribution only in web that too almost invisible. I challenge you to find it.

This is seriously not cool.

> I challenge you to find it.

Trivial - it's in the bottom right corner. It's easy to find if you're looking for it. The text is very small and has a bit less contrast than the one on Google Maps.

They've fixed it in the web, mobile will be fixed in the new release according to the linked comment. Maybe threaten to sue them if this is a priority for you.

From https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright/en

> How to credit OpenStreetMap

They also steal the lightning data too... https://community.windy.com/topic/6865/lightning-tracker/3

Off Topic:

I thought the forum was running on Discourse, but turns out to be something called NodeBB, first time I heard of it, it is similar in design, and I think it felt slightly faster / snapier than Discourse.

Thought for a second someone had posted this on HN: https://fridababy.com/products/windi - Which is a bit of a hack in itself, and one that I'm sure would have generated some interesting responses.

We use this website in oceanography to understand what kind of weather conditions our buoys are in. Off the coast of greenland this is helpful to shunt the wind turbines in extreme wind - not because they can't handle the wind, but because the waves crash on the spinning blades and shatter them.

Love Windy. Use it for surf condition predictions. Better than Surfline!

same, Surfline doesn't have all the spots ;)

Man, the performance is pretty incredible considering what all it's doing. I'm going to try it out on some other devices.

This is just about the most perfect marriage of domain and website I've ever seen.

Its a tragedy they dropped 3D view. Makes it pretty useless for the area around poles

Do you look up predictions a lot of those areas?

Very nice. And the name actually fits, which is a rarity in itself.

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