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Comment by dekerta | Hacker News Reader

Windy.com has a neat feature that displays current drought conditions for the entire world:

https://www.windy.com/-Drought-intensity-awp_0_40

Interesting that windy shows Cape Ann (Gloucester, MA area) as “no drought” and the unl site has the same area as “extreme drought”.

Yeah, both data sources are very suspect.

Why does this not line up well with the linked data, I wonder?

Windy.com uses the "INTERSUCHO" system from the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. Here's the paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/7/913

There's a website (it's in Czech): https://intersucho.cz/

Windy.com, being developed in Europe, often uses European datasets.

Looks like windy.com is showing short-term trends, perhaps driven by things like “how long since it last rained”, etc. Michigan is showing severe drought, and then you set the date to the 12th and it all clears to normal (there’s rain in the forecast around then.)

It’s a lot different than the long term trends driven by total annual precipitation, snowpack, etc.

windy is my favorite website. Absolutely loved it from day1. Wonder if anyone on that team is a HNer

great "eye candy" but posts here now are raising questions about the accuracy of the windy data models

I’ve found it to be pretty accurate to not drive into potential tornadoes as it uses pretty up to date data which lets me track storm paths.

The difference between “that looks really bad” and “ that looks really bad but will be moved on by the time I get there” is very helpful. Plus being able to text a screenshot of me about to drive into a major storm cell to the owner of my truck is priceless.

https://earth.nullschool.net is pretty nice

I still prefer ventusky. Nice ux, fast and accurate.

Nice, my neck of the woods is absolutely parched :D. Some rain predicted this week though. I heard France was really bad but it doesn't look too bad in comparison.

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