weather system web sites with good accuracy

Irish Steve

The last few days have shown how much interest there is in weather, so here's a thought for the people who are up to speed with weather sites.

A new name for me this last week has been the Ventusky weather site which on the face of it seems to offer a lot of information over a wide area, with a lot of selectable option for different factors. The 64,000 question is how accurate is it, or is it not using good sources to derive the modelling. If it's not good, what alternatives would those with experience recommend.

Cork Lass

I’d recommend the weather forum on boards.ie :P

Liffey4A

Are there any other similar weather forums to this?
I remember the Irish weather network was active a few years ago but is now gone.

Donegal Storm

I'd never heard of that site until this event and never clicked on it until just now, it's got some nice graphics but I don't find it all that intuitive and all the data I'm guessing is based off the GFS which isn't a great model for viewing medium term forecasts

Meteociel has been the standard bearer for this forum for the 10 years or so that I've been here, it's got all the main models, loads of parameters, is nicely laid out and easy to view charts.

http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/ecmwf.php

It's a French website but easy to follow, has loads of different models on the menu on the left and really its got everything you should need as a casual enthusiast

nlrkjos

YR.NO, best you can get, accurate as they do a lot of shipping and oil platform forecasts...these have to be accurate as lives may depend on them.

sdanseo

wetterzentrale.de - chrome translate is your friend
netweather.tv

And of course Meteociel.

Snotty

nlrkjos wrote: »

YR.NO, best you can get, accurate as they do a lot of shipping and oil platform forecasts...these have to be accurate as lives may depend on them.

Something has changed with yr.no in the last month or so, they are using different algorithms or models, their accuracy for the northwest has ready fallen and after swearing by them for years, I deleted their app last week.

Irish Steve

Donegal Storm wrote: »

I'd never heard of that site until this event and never clicked on it until just now, it's got some nice graphics but I don't find it all that intuitive and all the data I'm guessing is based off the GFS which isn't a great model for viewing medium term forecasts

Meteociel has been the standard bearer for this forum for the 10 years or so that I've been here, it's got all the main models, loads of parameters, is nicely laid out and easy to view charts.

http://www.meteociel.fr/modeles/ecmwf.php

It's a French website but easy to follow, has loads of different models on the menu on the left and really its got everything you should need as a casual enthusiast

From what I can see of it, short term forecasting is based on the German ICON model, which changes when that runs out of forward forecast.
There's a few things I liked, being able to switch between wind, gust, rain pressure and temperature is nice, and one of the things I liked a lot (because we have flooding issues here) is the option to run a cumulative rainfall from a specific date/time, which rolls forward without resetting if that's what's selected, and that's very nice for my specific requirement. Being able to put the mouse pointer over a location and get the value of the selected condition for that place is also nice.

I'm running on a reasonably recent laptop, so the graphics performance is not bad, the other thing I like is that I can zoom in and out very easily to see the local picture over a relatively small area, or zoom out to get the bigger picture of what's going on over the entire island, or wider if I want to. It's a nicer interface than the earth.nullschool.net site, which I tried earlier, but couldn't get it to give me the relevant keypress options for the zoom settings, which might be adblock related, I've not had time to experiment further yet.

The other sites are also helpful, it will be interesting to see if any of the regulars comment on their preferences, and experiences with using the different sites, as that's probably the best guide to what's working well, and what's not as reliable, in that an unreliable model is not much good to us.

Thanks to everyone that's posted so far, it's appreciated

Rougies

Irish Steve wrote: »

From what I can see of it, short term forecasting is based on the German ICON model, which changes when that runs out of forward forecast.
There's a few things I liked, being able to switch between wind, gust, rain pressure and temperature is nice, and one of the things I liked a lot (because we have flooding issues here) is the option to run a cumulative rainfall from a specific date/time, which rolls forward without resetting if that's what's selected, and that's very nice for my specific requirement. Being able to put the mouse pointer over a location and get the value of the selected condition for that place is also nice.

I'm running on a reasonably recent laptop, so the graphics performance is not bad, the other thing I like is that I can zoom in and out very easily to see the local picture over a relatively small area, or zoom out to get the bigger picture of what's going on over the entire island, or wider if I want to. It's a nicer interface than the earth.nullschool.net site, which I tried earlier, but couldn't get it to give me the relevant keypress options for the zoom settings, which might be adblock related, I've not had time to experiment further yet.

The other sites are also helpful, it will be interesting to see if any of the regulars comment on their preferences, and experiences with using the different sites, as that's probably the best guide to what's working well, and what's not as reliable, in that an unreliable model is not much good to us.

Thanks to everyone that's posted so far, it's appreciated

It is what it is, an animated graphical representation of the GFS and ICON models that's easier to read for anyone not familiar with the static image charts from meteociel/wetterzentrale etc.

The first site in this style was https://earth.nullschool.net/ and there have been a lot of copycats since, but ventusky seems to be the popular one here on boards.ie at least.

Assuming the input data is correct their output seems fine overall, but a lot of blending and averaging is happening that's not necessarily accurate to the input for the sake of eye-candy.

Landr

Windy.com another good weather site

fryup

ventusky is easy to use for the average joe..but its by no means 100% accurate...there were plenty of times during the summer its forecasts were way off the mark

redsteveireland

Just saying -

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056531638

bnt

These sites don't actually run the models themselves, they use models generated elsewhere. So by asking how accurate they are, the real question is about the accuracy of the models behind them. Most will use GFS, and Ventusky is no exception, but some use others too.

The Meteociel link given above is to a page that uses the ECMWF model, which has delivered better predictions in some cases e.g. I recall it was the first model, by at least a day, to predict that Hurricane Sandy would hit New York. However, as you can see if you go there, it's very "granular". It offers forecasts at 24h intervals, compared to GFS (3h) or HIRLAM (1h but shorter range).

nlrkjos

Snotty wrote: »

Something has changed with yr.no in the last month or so, they are using different algorithms or models, their accuracy for the northwest has ready fallen and after swearing by them for years, I deleted their app last week.

I work in the Norwegian Sea, hope you are wrong ! but will check that out soonest :eek:

Gaoth Laidir

Ventusky uses the Icon, GFS, GEM and HRRR models. They're selectable in the Settings tab.

I tried it this morning and it was showing the date May 02 and the sunrise and sunset times were all over the place (1hr20min difference from one day to the next).

nlrkjos

stormgeo... is another good weather site, I get it at work but there is a paywall.