Windy.com: global weather website with live filters | Hacker News Reader

Windy.com: global weather website with live filters

windy.com

387 pointsthunderbong128 comments

Windy.com: See the wind, temperature, rain and air quality around you - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29882941 - Jan 2022 (35 comments)

Windy.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28486389 - Sept 2021 (212 comments)

Windy.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27843578 - July 2021 (1 comment)

Windy.com – lots of meteorological data presented well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21873630 - Dec 2019 (5 comments)

About Windy (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21701065 - Dec 2019 (34 comments)

Typhoon Lands in Japan – Windy Storm-Tracking Platform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21232332 - Oct 2019 (44 comments)

Windy.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094639 - Aug 2017 (103 comments)

Windy visualizations and UI are times better than the National Weather Service (NWS). I still like the Forecast Discussion however. The money weather quote today (from the NWS) is:

"Precipitable water values are expected to peak on Sunday night at around 2.50 inches, which would be 5 standard deviations from the mean for this time of year."

Also NHC has the best tropical cyclone coverage. Californians don’t need it often unless they go on a Florida vacation, so if you’re new to this, check it out.

E.g. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCDEP4+shtml/191444...

I saw a local (San Diego) news story teaching people how to read a hurricane prediction chart, coming from the east coast, it was very surprisingly to learn how local understanding those is

Missouri checking in, I do not have any idea what that chart is. I selfishly love east coast/gulf hurricanes because they always mean perfect weather for us.

Any hints on unseeing spermatozoa in their wind visualizations?

Love windy.com!

Another niche weather tool, Dark Sky, has always been a staple for me due to its hyperlocal rain predictions.

Small anecdote: there's a unique satisfaction in creating something of your own. A few years back, I started a home hobby weather project using an Arduino to collect microclimate data right from my backyard. It quickly became an expansive endeavor. I integrated it with a backend running on Kubernetes, had a React Native interface for mobile updates, and to maximize performance, parts of data processing were done using Rust and OCaml. I was exploring the trade-offs of the CAP theorem in real-time. You'd be surprised at how often "weather inconsistencies" were just my nodes not agreeing on state. It was less about weather forecasting accuracy and more about the adventure in distributed systems.

It ended up getting pretty expensive so scrapped it but I learned a lot from that project and remember it fondly

I miss dark sky! https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/

If you have an iPhone, the Dark Sky ultra-short-term rain forecasts do live on, in the built-in Weather app.

so niche it was bought out and shut down!

What do you use now that Dark Sky's APIs support has ended? Tomorrow.io's APIs seem interesting.

https://www.tomorrow.io/weather-api/

I am now using http://pirateweather.net/ it's not quite as good as DarkSky (They use less models for prediction) but they follow the DarkSky API design so if you invested in the DarkSky API it's easy to swap over. I just use it to display weather on a few devices around the house so nothing commercial, if you are just looking for a straight replacement for DarkSky's app they have http://merrysky.net/

I'm pretty sure DarkSky's API is now called WeatherKit https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/. A quick googling tells me you can use it with Android apps as well

AerisWeather is another option https://www.aerisweather.com/develop/api/. Disclaimer, I just started working with these weather nerds. It's a great place though, with a product and company run by developers. I recommend if you are looking for lots of neat features or need accuracy.

for my specific use-case with my Arduino/K8s setup, I found a mix of OpenWeatherMap and the National Weather Service's API to be optimal. OpenWeatherMap for broader metrics and the NWS for hyperlocal data, especially when it came to certain severe weather alerts. But tomorrow.io looks pretty interesting, definitely worth a poc

Very very cool.

I'm using it to monitor Hurricane Hillary that is currently on its way to Los Angeles: https://www.windy.com/?19.808,-114.170,5

They also have a hurricane tracker that overlays the forecast cone: https://www.windy.com/-Hurricane-tracker/hurricanes/hilary?s...

These guys also track hurricanes (by default), they also have handy satellite timelapses. https://zoom.earth/maps/satellite/#view=21.3,-119.9,4.58z/ov...

Windy also provides with embedded location webcams. Very cool to track the storm as it moves north.

I never thought I'd root for Hillary but I sure hope it goes fast over cali and saves the deluge for further north where it could help with the fires.

It could also potentially cause fires as cells spin off and lightning strikes hit areas that are at risk. IIRC this is how the fires at Big Basin SP started a couple years ago.

This reminds me a lot of another project[1] that I've used for years, but Windy seems more responsive and has an app. They're close enough I wonder if the null school one was an influence. Definitely an impressive visualization.

[1]: https://earth.nullschool.net/

earth.nullschool.net predates Windy. The first version of Windy was based on the earth.nullschool.net repo.

Along these lines, but the other direction and something I've seen developing is niche expert local forecasts. I follow a few, surfing, sailing etc.

Surfline [1] do an excellent (paid) regional analysis, and the best aspect is the long range outlook where they will incorporate any levels of uncertainty or conflict between the various weather models into their analysis. To the lay person there may be "the forecast", but interpreting the different models and incorporating local anomalies is very valuable.

Also excellent is the UK Met office 10 day trend[2], to get an idea of the uncertainty and macro patterns at play.

[1] https://www.surfline.com/surf-forecasts/north-cornwall/58581... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLccinRLccA&list=PLGVVqeJodR...

In the US we have Area Forecast Discussions (AFDs) issued by regional weather offices. They are a great resource and I wish more people outside aviation knew about them. They will generally include a high level discussion, detailed conversations about each forecast period, as well as aviation and marine (if applicable) considerations. Usually gives some great insight into what, for example “chance of showers” really means.

Example: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=OKX&issuedby=O...

AI6YR has created a fleet of Mastodon bots that replicate NWS forecasts and discussions. No depdendence on Twitter anymore.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/alternate-alerts-81852206

Great for Mastodon adoption for sure. And even better smarts on NWS for diversifying their alert systems, especially outside of a large corporate-owned platform.

He's operating outside of NWS by taking a converted feed from elsewhere. Iowa State I think. But he's offered to let the government take the whole thing over if they want. It's kind of important that someone does this, glad he stepped up.

You have always been able to roll your own code as well. There are Python libraries to produce verbose readouts of FAA METAR reports, for example.

Good point that the starting point of the data in this case is publicly available APIs, but, and this will sound backwards, centralizing ones main firehose on a decentralized platform seems like a great way to reach the masses, including individuals but also smaller media outlets that don't interface directly with those initial APIs.

Android app that uses the NOAA and NWS APIs. No ads, no user tracking and includes the forecast dicussions and the nowcoast visual.

https://nwsnow.net/

I use a different free app for forecasts, and it typically catches thermal winds like sea breezes with the default model. I still get skunked every now and then and show up at the beach with a board and not enough wind to go fast...

I'd like one of these for snorkeling. The experience depends a lot on weather conditions and micro-geographical factors.

1) underwater visibility around land masses is dependant on precipitation and swell conditions over the previous few days - i.e. the water will be murky if it's been pissing down and blowing a gale for the last 2 days. This is not so much a factor around offshore islands in deep water with strong currents.

2) In hilly areas, it's best to go out when there is an offshore wind, as the land mass shields the water from the wind, making the surface smoother.

3) people have preferences as to the direction and tide (incoming/outgoing/time after low/high tide).

4) It's great when the sun is out, and if you are spearfishing then you want the sun at your back so the fish can't see you.

In short there are a a lot of factors that, in some magical snorkeling forecast system, could all be rolled up into a score out of 10 for a specific geographical spot at a specific time.

The aviation METARs and TAFs are pretty nice, because they give the dew point, which can't usually be found on other weather forecasts. The Met Office and their peers of course use this information as part of their calculations, but it is nice to see it yourself because relative to the temperature it tells you at what altitude you can expect clouds and/or rain to form.

And yes, Windy has dew point as a layer!

PS. Relevant username ;) Windsurfing, traditional sailing, both?

From Ivo Lukačovič ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D ) of Seznam fame.

This should get more exposure: radar, cloud cover, warnings, and hurrricane tracks all in one...

https://nowcoast.noaa.gov/

Thank you for posting this. It's very good!

Kudos if there's any NOAA software engineers lurking.

Windy is awesome. I contribute my weather station to their data set, and it's my preferred way to share said station with friends and neighbors

What weather station do you use?

I have a Davis Vantage Pro 2, upgraded with an ultrasonic anemometer, and a few ESP32 based stations, that aggregate into a single data feed.

Step 1 for all sailing outings. Super well integrated with most forecast providers… and for everyone else, better radar than the Weather app on IOS.

I like the windfinder.com interface.

with regards of quality of forecast I don't know: don't really know if they just aggregate other's data or make some kind of forecast themselves.

Very useful for sailing, but also biking, hiking, any kind of outdoor activity. Turns out a certain temperature with 5 mph wind feels very different from the same temperature with 20 mph wind.

I like this app for being forward about the weather models that it uses and letting you choose between them. Most regular places that show weather present the work as "their" forecast, but they're typically repackaging weather model information. No pretense here.

They have an API too.

https://api.windy.com/

i'm assuming this is where my most-used map lately has been getting their data. air quality overlaid with fire locations and wind direction is super handy

https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map

990€ / year

If you had a global product that required this level of coverage, you’d have global customers. This is well worth the cost for this type data.

Worth mentioning they also have a great webcam tool and and API to go along with it.

I added a web-cam to my community site wetrockpolice [1] to help climbers identify when conditions get wet out in Red Rock Canyon, was free and easy to do!

[1]: https://wetrockpolice.com/redrock

West coast folks should give the NHC's interactive map a try. The static map gets copied around a lot but the interactive map will let you see the past/current track (remember the track doesn't matter, it's just a best guess center, anywhere near the track is bad), wind speeds, earliest arrival time of winds, storm surge watches & warnings, wind radius, etc.

It's an underused treasure, however simplistic the UI may be.

See: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml/204534.s...

You can find individual static maps (sadly very low resolution) here as well for Hurricane Hilary: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_ep4.shtml?start#contents

Windy is my favourite app. I love to watch the movement of the clouds and rain/snow patterns. It is so much better than anything else out there. I really hope it stays true to its roots and not become crappy like other weather apps have become over the period (weather.com for instance).

I remember reading the history of Windy and somehow they're able to get quite a lot of money through donations. Here's an example from 2019 [1]

[1] https://m.facebook.com/windyforecast/videos/windy-donations/...

Any mention of the app ought to include the caveat that it is closed-source and not available on F-Droid.

Windy is as good as advertised. On a bit of a sad note, they just recently moved a number of their longtime standard features behind a subscription wall.

I still have their previous android app version, the ungelded one. It's promising unspecified delights if I'd only just upgrade.

epilogue: I have an odd issue with Firefox nightly and sites using wind animation. I get colored, vertical bars overlaying the entire page. I can see a ghost of the content behind the bars. It's only on one device. I can't find any reference to anyone else having this issue. Perhaps someone else does and is looking for a pattern. (keywords: firefox, nightly, wind animation, Windy, possible HN rules violation)

Now wait for someone to buy this and shut it down like they did Dark Sky.

Not gonna happen, Microsoft wanted to buy them in the past, owner/dev is creator of seznam.cz, one of few search engines with own tech, which for years had more users than Google in CZ.

When Microsoft aimed for Bing to be better than Google, they've actually flew to CZ and asked the seznam.cz CEO to sell his company to them, he said no :D

https://twitter.com/ilblog/status/1489657900687626240?lang=c...

The Czech tech sector is rather interesting. They have lots of local services that are seriously competitive with their international counterparts. Mapy.cz is an aggressively good openstreetmap interface

Hope that doesn't happen :( I miss dark sky: https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/

It looks similar to ventusky.com

Exactly what I was thinking. Comparing it with https://www.ventusky.com/?p=26.8;-117.1;4&l=wind-10m it’s almost identical.

This was brought up in an old thread about windy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15095654

It looks remarkably similar. One must be a copy of the other. I was aware of Ventusky first but doesn't necessarily mean it came first.

Wikipedia says Windy.com came ~2 years earlier. Funnily enough, they are both Czech projects.

This has been my go to weather site since I heard of it last year. I've yet to find another website or app with the variety of detailed radar views that windy has, and seems to be extremely accurate.

The My Radar app* on iOS has a wind layer and I highly recommend it. We live in one the windiest parts of the world/stuck out in the ocean, and it's very helpful to know the wind, especially on a beach or outside activity day.

*https://apps.apple.com/us/app/myradar-weather-radar/id322439...

This is also very cool (awesome URL!), and I'll be mentioning it in my next blog post.

I absolutely love windy.com. Prior to having a ForeFlight subscription, I found it to have the most accurate hourly forecasts before heading up on a flight. Both the website and mobile app are stellar, and they put extra effort into building tools for pilots. They have the best visualizations for cloud layers, let you toggle UTC time, and they integrate with airport info beautifully. I’d set notifications on METAR updates prior to heading out so I’d stay up to date.

Somewhat on topic: what's a good site and/or app to get a non-sensationalized and understandable overview of the Atlantic hurricane situation. I wanted to check on the wind shear, water temperature, and forecast. Especially after the recent articles about the hot tub level temps around Florida, and others about how wind shear is preventing hurricanes from forming in the Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico/Caribbean.

This is a vector map with lots of fun data layers, including wind and wave height. You need to submit an email though: https://demos.aerisweather.com/

Tropical Tidbits is excellent.

Thank you, it is really good. I was able to find the wind shear forecast pretty easily, and cycle through a lot of detailed images. (obviously, understanding that the further out I go, the wider the error bars will be)

Here's hoping that the wind shear continues to stay strong enough to protect people from any bad hurricanes. Although I don't know what will happen if that ocean energy isn't "bled off" by a few big storms?

I like windy.com but my regular goto for weather the past few years has been spotwx.com. For wind, this is a lot harder to read but the accuracy to three days is incredible: https://a.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/wxloop.cgi?mm5d2...

What model does spotwx.com use? Windy can show 6 different models (gfs 22km, ecmwf 9km, meteoblue, icon-d2 2.2km, Arome 1.3km, UKV 2km) side by side so you can compare wind forecasts for the next days. Windy is my goto app for wind forecasts, also use weatherpro.

Spot shows them all and you click on to view the one you want. It's a much simpler interface than windy but I can see the day and the week at a glance and it's easier than windy to plan with.

yr.no (app and web) is from the Norwegian weather institute, it has wind and rain layers too and work all over the world. They're is also has a free api [1]

I may be biased being Norwegian myself, but it's my favorite weather app. No spam or ads or anything either.

[1] https://developer.yr.no/

Slightly related: iOS 17 beta shows weather as forecast high as well the 50 year (1970-2020) average high for that day.

It is a small tweak but has really made me realize how this year is so significantly above historical averages.

Where I live in BC, Canada we have been 8-10 degrees Celsius over the average for much of the summer, which has made me wonder how native vegetation is doing considering it likely hasn’t experienced this weather and is less adaptable than humans and other animals.

I hope they're certain that the values are directly comparable.

That, for example, the same apparatus was used, the same processing algos, the same measuring locations, etc.

"Average high/low for this day" has been used in local weather forecasts on the local news for decades, let's not overthink it.

I've been using it for a while. It's pretty good yet I think the accuracy of weather prediction could be better (at least in my part of France). Real-time rain and wind is really useful though and much easier to use than all weather website out there.

I think they do not make any forecast themselves, just aggregate sources: at least in 2018 since in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D I can read: "As of May 2018 it had a team of six employees, and 300,000 users visiting the site per day": pretty hard to imagine world forecast with only six employees :)

They're not doing their own weather predictions, they use different models. You can see them if you click compare for a specific location (Rouen, for example): https://www.windy.com/multimodel/49.44/1.09?temp,49.443,-0.5...

the list is scrollable

You can switch between different forecast sources (GFS/ICON/ECMWF etc)

In my part of the US, I find the GFS model is most accurate in the summer months and ECMWF does better in the winter. I haven’t really figured out which one works best in the transitional months.

Been loving it for many years. For the 2017 eclipse I was able to narrowly avoid some weather to get a great view. I was using their wind, radar and jet stream visualizations to guess as to where I should go. Maybe I just got lucky ;)

I just went to the place with the lowest historic cloud cover for that time of year. I'd like to do that again for 2024 but it means the desert in central mexico...

I wanted to go there because it’s also the greatest/longest eclipse location, but wasn’t sure about what it would be like to travel there. I’m sure it’ll be an incredible place to view it from.

I'd love to see this on a globe rather than a Mercator projection.

Click on the "3D" button on the top right corner

Oh! OK then... that's really cool.

It's interesting how they still need to do some fudging around the poles. Non-Euclidean geometry is hard, I guess. I wonder if that means the models are all done with Euclidean geometry or is it just a display thing?

Most of all models are resolved in some sort of projected space. It depends on the model (e.g GFS uses an inflated cube, the ICON global from dwd is projected on to an icosahedron, IFS just moves most of the calcs to a spectral space instead of point-grid, and many regional/meso scale domains use a conic projection). Also by and large it’s easier to assume the earth is spherical and then nudge any differences in datum to Mach your crs.

Most often, final global models are output on to an orthogonal (plate-caree) lat/lon grid. Data at the poles (singularity) is always a bit fidly

What is the reason for modelling on a projected space? It seems to me at least mathematically to be fine to come up with equations in polar coordinates. It's still a metric space with great circle distance. Is it a performance tradeoff? I Euclidean distance is a lot easier to calculate.

Not an option on mobile (iOS)

I sometimes find it helpful to go to the source for these weather visualisations. I really enjoy some of the data visualisation available on the ECMWF website, although the React webapp is rather fragile!

https://charts.ecmwf.int/

US readers might want to look for the HRRRv4 model on the NOAA site which will be the most precise model for you.

Windy is a blast and I am a subscriber, but due to recent historic high temperatures some weather models are failing, usually inaccurate by 20 knots.

That's very interesting to hear. This last weekend down here in Florida was unbearable. I got my first sunburn in like 20 years, just last Saturday. And I'm out in the sun every weekend wakeskating.

When we were training mountain gliding in Omarama, windy.com was used for alot during preflight briefings. It's actually very accurate. Been using it as my primary weather tool ever since because it can give localised per square kilometre hourly forecasts. Basically you pretty much know if the next hour at a particular place will rain or not. (Came in good use during a date.) YMMV.

The windy.com app (at least on iOS) is quite elegant and packs a lot of info into the experience. Very diff from most other weather look-and-feels.

Nice app but I miss realtime rain info. I prefer Yandex Weather: https://yandex.com/weather/maps/nowcast

It has a layer selector with temperature, wind, pressure and precipitation.

Well, it has Radar (for Europe, US and some parts of the rest) & Satellite layer (whole world), which shows you current conditions. It can also show meteo-stations with current values of temperature, pressure and so on.

I pay for Windy Premium and it's worth it if only for access to the HRRR model, an absurdly high-resolution, both spatial and temporal, forecasting model for the USA. Nothing comes close for accuracy of short-term forecasts for me.

Good companion site (app) to windy: https://www.blitzortung.org/en/live_lightning_maps.php?map=1...

Real-time lightning strikes on Windy.com [0]

[0] https://community.windy.com/topic/6605/real-time-lightning-s...

What is this color palette?! Starts with blue (0-5) and loops back to blue (60+)

I like windy but the radar is problematic, areas of blue typically are seeing no rainfall hitting the ground. I feel like the radar view is overstating the weather to look more impressive.

National weather radar is difficult to interpret. It isn't showing what people intuit it is showing, the relationship between that picture and what is going on outside is complicated. To make it even more complicated, weather radars switch modes depending on the weather conditions in their area of coverage which causes the underlying phenomenon they are measuring to change, so it isn't even consistent in that sense. The underlying metadata captures the operating radar mode but most people will have no idea what to do with that information.

And then there is the fact that weather radar captures a lot of phenomena that are not "weather".

Thanks for that explanation but windy consistently seems overstating rainfall.

Most rain never reaches the ground and the radar is measuring rain that is very far above ground level, so it generates false positives.

Reliable at-ground-level rain measurement has to come from other sources, like automotive sensors, ground weather stations, RF propagation measurements in mobile networks, etc. The downside is that these often have much less coverage than the radar.

Windy is definitely the ideal weather app for geeks. My favorite feature is the ability to switch between the 6 forecast models or even see all of them at the same time.

I use windy all the times when we fly drones, it’s good.

It's pretty, does anyone know if it is accurate?

When you click on a forecast you can choose the model or forecast provider, and you can set your default with an account. Windy.com just organizes the data, especially grouped by outside activity such as surfing, sailing, parasailing, but uses other data sources and doesn’t create its own forecasts.

For my microclimate, I’ve found that Meteoblue is the only forecast that doesn’t forecast the high temperature 10 degrees too low when there is a heat wave.

I've been using the Android app (with a subscription) all summer for sailing. It's good enough to help me decide 72 hours in advance which day to go out and on what body of water. Also helps determining if I'll need to have another meat bag onboard (beside my own) to keep the mast pointing up during gusts, so I have a time to make phone calls.

Windy visualizations raw or direct outputs from the weather forecast models run by agencies in the USA and Europe. These models are the "bread and butter" of operational weather forecasting, and are the baseline in accuracy for all weather forecasts generally.

That being said, you shouldn't treat these outputs as gospel. All these models will get the big picture correct, but they have limitations with respect to spatial resolution. So if you click on the Windy map and look at your local forecast, take it with a grain of salt - the model doesn't resolve down to the scale of your backyard. The status quo is for companies or agencies to use statistics or ML to "correct" the forecast against local observations, which dramatically improves the accuracy of forecasts like, "What will tomorrow's max temperature be" or, "what is the probability it will rain this evening?"

It’s as accurate as the underlying models, from which you can select the one you’d like to see visualized.

https://www.windy.com/articles/what-is-forecast-model-3397

I need to combine it with some other site like weather underground because it seems to me that windy uses past model outputs for current conditions, instead of actual observations. So it’s as good as anything for the near future, but not great for the present.

Well, it is showing Hurricane Hillary, which is on its way to Los Angeles: https://www.windy.com/?19.808,-114.170,5

It's one of the most trusted apps by sailors, so I'd say it's fairly accurate compared to most alternatives.

I would like to have Ivo's head (founder of seznam.cz, windy.com and sold Melown startup for a few hundreds of mils )

Would it be possible to overlay this to Goggle Earth to get a live weather updated sphere shaped map for the globe?

There is earth nullschool which does use the WGS84 spheroid projection that you are after. But it has a pretty narrow set of parameters to explore.

Why doesn't the Android app allow you to drag the forecast time around arbitrarily like the website does?

It also has surprisingly detailed and complete hiking trails on it (for the Alps at least).

Openstreetmap sourced. Their android app windy maps is pretty good for hiking trails.

I didn't know that! Windys color scheme is a lot clearer (and I like you see hiking trail numbers on it) but OSM shows hiking refuges when more zoomed out.

EDIT: https://i.imgur.com/WBiptdo.png for example on OSM, vs https://i.imgur.com/EsZCsA8.png on Windy

It is based on mapy.cz [1] - Outdoor layer. It is mostly OSM based (plus lot of their own data for Czechia and Slovakia). Mapy.cz belongs to same guy, who runs Windy (Ivo Lukačovič [2]). IMHO it is best readable map on the internet and when I am used to it, I cant find anything on Google Maps.

[1] https://en.mapy.cz [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivo_Luka%C4%8Dovi%C4%8D

Wow this is a really nice weather app. Will be using this in the future.

The further I zoom in the colder it gets. :D

It's good for wind, for rain less so.

Rain model forecasts are there too, e.g.:

https://www.windy.com/-Rain-thunder-rain?rain,34.427,-119.70...

Yes, but the animations/visualization is less clear than competing services.

I've been using https://zoom.earth/ but this is a nice addition.

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