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Windy.com - an amazing wind and weather visualisation site

Just found the option in windy how to live-view webcams all around the world. That is cool! This helps a lot viewing the weather as it is, the eye just can process so much more data than what is contained in separate diagrams. You can estimate cloud base and top, humidity and convectiveness and so on. This is not for days ahead, of course.

Germany

Indeed; I use this for Alps crossings and used it totally for these two flights.

Cloud vertical extent forecasting is unreliable, especially in convective situations like now which is fundamentally impossible to forecast (France/Germany/etc)

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Ibra wrote:

The easier way for me is to use average cloud layers: “low clouds (6kft), medium clouds (20kft) and high clouds” then you get SCT, FEW, BKN, OVC labels, the view is (X,Y) point for various t and Z buckets

How do you manage do get octa labels on the map? Is there a view that shows octas for low/medium/high clouds in (t, Z) for a given point (X, Y)?

EDNG, EDST, EDMT, Germany

For 2D view look here, example for average Oktas of “low clouds” (<6kft)


For (t,Z) vertical view UdoR shared there are 4 shades of grey in vertical profile, so you can guess the amount of clouds and also if there is a celing (Z>BKN & OVC) or any gaps bellow (Z<FEW & SCT)

Last Edited by Ibra at 26 Jul 10:06
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Ah, thanks! I never noticed the legend at the bottom – only saw the percentages when selecting a specific location. However I still find it somewhat difficult to distinguish the different shades of grey.

Ibra wrote:

For (t,Z) vertical view UdoR shared there are 4 shades of grey in vertical profile, so you can guess the amount of clouds and also if there is a celing (Z>BKN & OVC) or any gaps bellow (Z<FEW & SCT)

Thanks for pointing out! Again, I did not realize that in this view the depiction of the clouds differs from that in the “Meteogram”.

Last Edited by Supersonic at 26 Jul 15:04
EDNG, EDST, EDMT, Germany

Supersonic wrote:

However I still find it somewhat difficult to distinguish the different shades of grey.

Yes color is hard to guess but it’s by 25% buckets, higher than 50% indictaes ceiling (BKN & OVC) is less than 6kft, bellow 50% you will start to find holes

Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Ibra wrote:

Yes color is hard to guess but it’s by 25% buckets, higher than 50% indictaes ceiling (BKN & OVC) is less than 6kft, bellow 50% you will start to find holes

To my own VFR experience this forecast is useless (read: bullsh**). With stratiform clouds it’s better to look into a (non-magic) glass ball to find the expected cloud cover. Windy indicates the cloud cover to any given time by a value of 1% accuracy, but not only that it’s impossible to give a weather forecast with such an accuracy, but they also do not show the reliability of the values. If an indicated 40% can be anything between 0 and 100 it’s of no use.

Another point is, that it’s pointless to know clouds in 6kft without knowing whether clouds will reach up to FL100, or down to 2kft, for example. It is just another game if cloud layer is 80% but thickness 300ft, or 80% with thickness of 8000 ft – at least for flying VFR. Or when clouds are present in 4kft, but not reaching up to 6kft.

In the end, I found the weather charts provided by DWD much more reliable, and much closer to the weather to be expected – at least those issued close to takeoff time.

Wind forecast of Windy seems to be quite accurate, and some features are very good like point and click on airports to get METAR/TAF and the easy access to Webcams. But the cloud modelling seems to need some more years of development.

Last Edited by UdoR at 28 Jul 19:30
Germany

The layers in Windy are just “visualisation tool”, the output data comes from “forecasting models” which are the same used everywhere

It would have been easy if one can build a script that says VMC/IMC at X altitude rather than having to fiddle around with the different ways of representing the data or talking about fronts & cloud types

Other ways to get cloud amounts on raw data are sats images, t-skew, webcams, METAR but nothing beats going up to have a closer look !

Last Edited by Ibra at 28 Jul 19:46
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Ibra wrote:

higher than 50% indictaes ceiling (BKN & OVC) is less than 6kft

That confuses me: how do you establish the correlation of cloud coverage and ceiling?

EDNG, EDST, EDMT, Germany

UdoR wrote:

In the end, I found the weather charts provided by DWD much more reliable, and much closer to the weather to be expected – at least those issued close to takeoff time.

Which weather model do you use in Windy? ICON-EU comes from DWD, I guess.

EDNG, EDST, EDMT, Germany
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