Phenomenal work! I live in a city known for its sporadic gusts and high wind speeds (no surfing around here, unfortunately!), so this will be quite useful! I'm also interested in an API, so I'd like to get in touch with you as well.
Interesting. WRF is the model that RASP uses - so surface winds should be similar. It would be nice to have higher level winds there, too, although since that's a sailing site this is probably not a priority for the people behind the site.
Glider pilot here. The website looks awesome! Thank you for it! If you guys could add winds at higher levels, it would really be useful for all kinds of sky sailors as well.
When I was working for electrical utilities and tracking climate data over a service territory a service like this with an API would have been invaluable. I would have thrown money hand over fist at them. Particularly if I could predict accurately micro-conditions within the next 12-24 hours.
The microconditions are tricky, but yes there is business there. We've done a few proof of concepts using CV + ML/statistics in the area of storm tracking.
Do you have any insight into what the electrical utilities companies are doing these days in terms of weather forecasting?
At the time I was using the National Climatic Data Center's datasets from AWOS and ASOS and combining that with locally sourced airport weather stations, mobile micro-climate stations, and helicopter mounted climate collection systems. It was a lot of fun... :(
We were evaluating using a service provider such as Weather Underground or AWS Truepower. But those providers couldn't deliver the granularity or locality of collection that we needed for our obligations.
The utility industry required aerial LiDAR collection to be partnered with same time collection of local climate conditions for use in modeling the impact of wind/solar/temp on conductor line sag. We did a bunch of pioneering work in that area back in 2012.
I am wondering how wind directions are calculated? Is there a realistic model that uses height maps and fluid dynamics or just a simple one for visual purposes?
Does that mean you can possibly also get indications of gusting in direction as well as speed from the terrain? That would be really useful for sailing, particularly inland. Or maybe that's a more local effect, and beyond the resolution of these models?
I currently pay for iKiteSurf and this could be a viable alternative if it's accurate. iKSurf does actually place miniature weather stations at kite beaches though, so it might be hard to match that accuracy.
I didn't get a prompt asking for permission to use my location, yet the map was already focused over my location (though the loaded city text was wrong). Any idea what is going on here?
We use your IP to determine your approximate location. Not very precise, but useful because it puts at least in the right country/state, so you don't have to search for it :)
If you google matplotlib viridis there is a discussion of the issue. Using perceptually uniform colormaps(not to mention ones that translate to gray scale correctly) is normally the correct thing to do, but not always. Sometimes you want to highlight particular conditions. For instance, jet with radar data tends to nicely separate different atmospheric conditions if set up right. The same perceptual colormap version feels somehow lacking.
Depends on the area. Windfinder and Windguru are using the GFS model which has a resolution of only 50/100km.
For example for winds, in the US we are using NOAAs HIRESW with a resolution of 5km and in Europe we are using mostly WRF models from national agencies with 2-10km resolution depending on area.
I noticed a UX bug here: http://snpy.in/E34hR9