
Windy.com - davesque
https://www.windy.com/
======
ilblog
We are happy that you like windy.com. If you want to help us with this
project, then report all issues to community.windy.com We love bug reports
from programmers, with all screenshots etc (Ivo)

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dejv
Windy was coded by billionaire founder and owner of Seznam, which is czech
search engine (and media company), one of only three other search engines in
the world that still beats Google in local market.

~~~
tasuki
Has he actually coded it himself? Do you have more information?

Seznam is a remarkable company. Their maps ([http://mapy.cz](http://mapy.cz))
are second to none, my favourite feature are touristic maps which work at
least within Europe.

~~~
Semaphor
Wow. Mapy.cz is amazing. Just checked my German town. Not only more
information than Google, it's way faster. Everything feels instant.

~~~
laurent123456
It seems to be based on OpenStreetMap (I recognise some changes I made), which
is indeed a lot more detailed than Google Maps in some areas.

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breakingcups
It is, see the copyright in the bottom-left corner.

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bhhaskin
That is pretty cool! Although hijacking the back button is a bit annoying.

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doomlaser
They hijack a lot of standard buttons. I couldn't command-L to focus into the
address bar. I have a special disdain for this trend.

~~~
ilblog
We check it, this seems like bug

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jackschultz
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.

~~~
lllr_finger
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.

~~~
jackschultz
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.

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PaulHoule
What I can't get over is the speed.

Ever since tile maps have become the norm, most of the weather radar services
are unbearably slow on my DS(Hel)L connection. This loads fast.

I wonder what they are doing right.

~~~
stephenhuey
Yes, the hurricane looks pretty:

[https://www.windy.com/?29.770,-95.363,5](https://www.windy.com/?29.770,-95.363,5)

I noticed Windy.com took me straight to this spot due to my location near the
approaching storm, so in case you're in a part of the world with a little less
going on right now, check out the winds coming to Texas.

~~~
PaulHoule
That storm is looking serious. Not only is it a powerful storm but it looks
like it is going to hang over Corpus Christi for maybe 2 days and then slowly
head up the Gulf coast for 3 days after that. They are talking 3 feet of rain
and that is a fairly flat area so I can only hope people can get away from
there.

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penagwin
This looks incredibly similar to
[https://www.ventusky.com/](https://www.ventusky.com/) doesn't it?

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n17r4m
[https://earth.nullschool.net](https://earth.nullschool.net) as well.

~~~
mxfh
A bit of post hint.fm streamline history:

It can be sourced back to Cameron Beccario's project getting some exposure in
late 2013 after launch as open source.
[https://github.com/cambecc/earth](https://github.com/cambecc/earth)

It's cited as direct motivation by _windy_ :
[https://community.windy.com/topic/4/about-
windy](https://community.windy.com/topic/4/about-windy)

\---

For the record: _windy_ , launched as _windity_ in late 2014, this was 1 1/2
years before _ventusky_ :

"ventusky is owned by InMeteo, built to compete with windyty, which was
originally a copy of my site's open source repo"

"if you're curious: [http://hint.fm/wind](http://hint.fm/wind) launched Mar?
2012, e.n.n Dec 2013, windyty Nov 2014, and ventusky Jul 2016"

[https://twitter.com/cambecc/status/784448346471530496](https://twitter.com/cambecc/status/784448346471530496)

\---

I also recommend his talks at "The Graphical Web" 2014:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNODLWhSbw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXNODLWhSbw)

and _openvis_ 2015:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSmNZm1e0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLSmNZm1e0k)

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amai
Formerly known as windyty:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windyty&sort=byPopularity&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=windyty&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

They get their data from
[https://www.meteoblue.com/](https://www.meteoblue.com/) .

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SeanDav
This site just went straight to my bookmark list, brilliant.

Small criticism: Every time you move it creates new page entry in the back
button list, so once you have moved around a bit you can't use browser back
button to easily go back to previous website.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
That was my same thought. This is one of the few rare times I don't think
using the browser history makes sense for an SPA (at least, in its current
implementation).

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mourner
Great project! I recently wrote a detailed technical post on how to implement
a similar visualization with WebGL — check it out:
[https://blog.mapbox.com/how-i-built-a-wind-map-with-
webgl-b6...](https://blog.mapbox.com/how-i-built-a-wind-map-with-
webgl-b63022b5537f)

~~~
ilblog
We use a lot of @mourners node libs on backend

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karboosx
Very similar to: [https://www.ventusky.com](https://www.ventusky.com)

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godelski
I was just going to say that. Because I found that on HN. I had also found
this here
[https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/](https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/)
(before ventusky)

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malloryerik
I wrote in their forums suggesting they add air quality/pollution info and
greenhouse gas emissions to their maps and it was done in about three days. I
was impressed.

Btw I think they use Riot.js on their front end?

~~~
prh8
They do use Riot, there was a blog post somewhere about it a bit ago.

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Stratoscope
[https://www.windy.com/?24.087,-93.604,5](https://www.windy.com/?24.087,-93.604,5)

Yikes.

~~~
karlkatzke
Yeah, I'm a little up and to the left of that (a couple hundred miles inland.)

While the big spinning mass offshore is the headline, the subtitle is that
everything east of I-35 is going to get somewhere between a foot and two feet
of rain. Not snow, water.

~~~
24gttghh
Do you know what they grow around Corpus Christi[0]? Looks like a lot of rich,
dark soil that is about to be washed out to sea...

[0][https://www.google.com/maps/@27.6570039,-97.6556344,44285a,3...](https://www.google.com/maps/@27.6570039,-97.6556344,44285a,35y,348.75h/data=!3m1!1e3)

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stanlarroque
It reminded me of this awesome project:
[https://earth.nullschool.net/](https://earth.nullschool.net/)

~~~
Shivetya
well that would be the first major hurricane to strike the US in over ten
years. hopefully people aren't too complacent and still take them seriously.

I would hope FEMA does better this time but recent track record of that agency
still is not good.

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sccxy
They also provide free API
([http://api.windytv.com/](http://api.windytv.com/))

Which is very cool to track ocean sailing.

I have made several trackers to follow around the world sailing
races/adventures.

[https://gis.ee/lb/](https://gis.ee/lb/)

[https://tracker.ee/](https://tracker.ee/)

~~~
aw3c2
Are there ways to use them outside JS? E.g. to get georeferenced video?

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rthomas6
Looks like they are using [http://leafletjs.com/](http://leafletjs.com/)

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JumpCrisscross
You know what strikes me? Look at the overland place where the winds move
quickly. _Those are our cities_. We're living off whiffs in the aerodynamic
backwaters on a world of windy metropoli.

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StavrosK
That's funny, as some friends of mine made the exact same thing years ago, and
it even had a similar name (Weendy):

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/weendy-an-extreme-
sports-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/weendy-an-extreme-sports-app-
that-merges-crowdsourced-and-actual-weather-data-gets-240k-led-by-archimedes/)

They have since pivoted to something similar, as AFAIK they didn't get enough
traction.

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abtinf
Is there a name for the hotspot wind system south of Africa? That looks
intense.

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ragazzina
"Roaring Forties" and "Furious Fifties".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Forties)

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CharlesDodgson
As someone who works with mapping data and web based maps regularly, this
website is excellent in terms of usability. The ease of switching overlays,
adding symbols, saving selection, adjusting the map are all excellent and
intuitive. The ability to drill down on symbols added in a smooth and sensible
way is excellent. This is how you make web maps for specialist data!

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bmm6o
This has been my go-to for sailing conditions for a while. I used other sites
before it (Predict Wind, Surf Watch), but Windy is fast and responsive and
usable on a phone. The data for sites like these all ultimately come from the
same sources (the big weather models) so the differentiators in this space are
mostly in the user experience.

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ClassyJacket
Holy hell please give me my back button back.

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ge96
Yeah browser push state for days

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crosbyar
Other than the whizbang interface there's nothing really innovative going on
here as far as actual science... Same with all the other me-too sites that use
that same streamline animation code. Some of the visualization is downright
misleading, but whatever. The ventusky wave animation is awful and physically
incorrect.

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pmoleri
Great website, has been around for some years as windity and windytv. I guess
windy will be its final name. I usually find windguru.cz more easy to read,
but windy offers a cool visualization that I think gives more context. It's
really cool to check it during hurricanes.

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sparrish
Not sure where the data is coming from but my area is showing arrows to the
north west. We nearly never get wind from the south east and looking outside
this map isn't accurate.

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penagwin
I have no source for this, but it might be possible that the wind it's
reporting is from a higher altitude. 4k to 5k meters above the ground the wind
could be moving in the opposite direction from the ground.

Source: [http://www.eniscuola.net/en/argomento/air-in-
motion/winds/hi...](http://www.eniscuola.net/en/argomento/air-in-
motion/winds/high-altitude-winds/)

~~~
tomfanning
There's an altitude slider bottom right.

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bradb3030
It reminds me of hint.fm/wind

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33a
Looking at this made me realize how insanely huge storms are in the southern
ocean. Hurricanes and typhoons up north have nothing on that.

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fosk
Interesting. Does anybody know why it happens?

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devrandomguy
There is a continuous ring of ocean the whole way around Antarctica. That
water can build up a lot of momentum as it is pulled around the Earth by tidal
forces. At least, that's what the captain told me, I'm sure there are
meteorologists around here with a much deeper understanding.

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ilblog
Just now we have launched weather radar layer:
[https://www.windy.com/?radar,27.863,-96.237,8](https://www.windy.com/?radar,27.863,-96.237,8)

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subroutine
It's going to be hot in SF today...

[https://imgur.com/gallery/NiMJk](https://imgur.com/gallery/NiMJk)

~~~
sccxy
240° is wind direction

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Dayshine
The UI is very small on a big screen. The entire right hand legend and menu is
taking up around 10% of my screen width, so the button are tiny!

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seltzered_
FWIW, I found hang gliders really enjoying this site (alongside some other
obscure wind estimation sites) for planning whether to go flying.

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rodolphoarruda
Thanks to this website I discovered that procrastination can reach new
levels... there's no limit to it.

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amelius
Is it just me or is this website really slow?

(Especially after pressing the "play" button in the lower left).

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sghiassy
It was fast for me on my iPhone

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loblollyboy
This is pretty, but I don't think it is going to be 35 C in the North Atlantic
any time soon.

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JeffPeters
Why do you only upload the latest three atmospheric models only one time (0000
UTC) per day?

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djsumdog
and if you want to see the windiest city in the world, it's in the South
Pacific:

[https://www.windy.com/-41.332/174.793?-41.801,174.793,8](https://www.windy.com/-41.332/174.793?-41.801,174.793,8)

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needz
Trying to back out of this website after zooming in is really frustrating.

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staticelf
My friend that works in the aerospace industry uses Windy all the time.

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ge96
Oh shit what's going on by Texas

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Hurricane Harvey

~~~
ge96
Crazy, people's lives being ripped out by strong winds and I just see some
swirls on a screen.

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nvahalik
What model is this pulling from?

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Zeebrommer
This site/app is my favorite because you can compare three models side by
side: gfs, ecmwf and nems.

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plopz
Not sure why they even bother pulling gfs, its miles behind the euro.

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nvr219
Thanks for correctly saying "these data" in the menu

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watz
I wanted to build something similar for surfing forecasts a couple years ago,
but couldn't find any decent data source... Where is the data coming from? Is
this publicly available?

