Re: Windy dot com website
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 9/17/2019, 1:40 pm
It's extremely popular. Traffic is at around the 2,000th most visited web site on the Internet:
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/windy.com#section_traffic

The wind data is a really nice visual. It's from model data. I've occasionally visited the site over the years, but I've never really used it much. I've always wondered how accurate it is. I haven't looked into it. Do they also base it on current observations for the current wind speed? Or is it only from the models you can choose from? I don't know. But it seems to be only model data.

As for the model data in the future, I assume it is as good as the models themselves.

I just spent 10 minutes on there. The satellite layer is nice:
https://www.windy.com/-Satellite-satellite?satellite,32.999,-70.774,6

I just don't know how much a site like that fills in the gaps between data. If I view model data on a site like Tropical Tidbits for example, I can't zoom in really close to get detailed data. On this site you can. But just because you can zoom in really close, doesn't mean that the data is accurate on that kind of scale.

Here's another site like it:
https://www.ventusky.com/?p=28.8;-78.2;5&l=wind-10m



I did a search and found this:
https://community.windy.com/topic/5456/how-accurate-this-windy-com-is/3

From a post that says the person is a moderator:

"Windy does not create any forecast data but instead only visualises forecast and actual data received from various third party providers.

So the question of accuracy is not for Windy but for the data providers. You can check information about the data source here:"



I would assume that they are interpolating some data though. But then again, I guess all sites might to some extent. Just don't assume that because you can zoom in to street level that the wind shown there is accurate to that level. With that caveat, and knowing that it is model data, not actual observations (unless they mix that in there too that I don't see), I guess it's a really nice visualization of model data.
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Windy dot com website - AlligatorPointer, 9/17/2019, 12:43 pm
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