I have recently found a new app for Android and IOS called Ventusky https://www.ventusky.com/. The interesting thing is that it allows the user (on paid version of the APP but seems free on website) to select different model scenarios so you can see what effect they have on predictions. When comparing GFS with ICON(EU) there seem to be quite different predictions especially for rain. Temperature is lower and closer to actual on GFS for my UK location.
Just wondered if anyone else has viewed this and their thoughts?
Dark Sky seems the least capable of the three wind and forecast charts I’m familiar with. Ventusky and Windy are my go-to sites. The latter two are quite capable and a preference for one or the other is a bit of a tossup. Sorry that the links default to my location…
I’d expect the USA to have better forecasts etc , we here in the UK have to rely on either EU stuff or GFS as the UK Met Office charges for access to their modelling data.
I’ve not looked at Ventusky, but I think all it’s showing is that no meteorological model is perfect. If a model was perfect in all circumstances there’d be no need for other models to exist. Each model has its biases…some might make it appear windier, others rainier, etc and these biases might be different under different regional conditions. If you follow the information releases for sources like GFS, you will sometimes see that a new model version has been released to improve on wind/other data so over time the models should be getting better.
So you might find that GFS is good for temperatures, ECMWF for wind and ICON-EU for rain…today. Tomorrow it might be GFS good for rain, ECMWF for temperatures and ICON-EU for wind. You’ll only know after the event though, so you probably can’t pick the right mix in advance for every day.
The ECMWF is regarded as the best modelling suite in the world. It almost always trumps the GFS is the verification statistics, as does the UKMO model. Also, a multitude of ECMWF charts were made free a while ago, short, medium and long range.
Another great model which is now free (accept some data, which I pay for) is the UKV. It’s the model that the Met Office uses for it’s app/website forecasts. It’s a superb model to view at short range, due to the 1.5KM resolution, and it updates 8 times a day.
As this is the WxSim board I would just add the data provided for WxSim use is the GFS. Firstly, because (I assume) it’s produced by Tom’s country meteorological service, but secondly, and more importantly, it’s the only free data source that provides the data that WxSim requires. Last time I looked it would have cost £10k’s per year to get ECMWF data. Neither myself, nor Sam, could bear that cost so the WxSim data source could no longer be provided free of charge if we moved away from GFS.
Possible good news - the ECMWF is supposedly now being offered at no charge! I think it’s delayed about an hour. Sam and I have looked into it a bit, but the word is that the free data will be unstable or unreliable until about June, when they get it moved to some better system or server. We’re considering grabbing that data when it becomes stable, and I’ll start looking into perhaps incorporating it into WXSIM. It’s potientially a significant improvement, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself here!
Unless there’s somewhere else I’ve missed the free data is fairly limited by comparison to GFS. It didn’t look like a drop-in replacement for the GFS data.
Also the forecast time periods aren’t the same every 6 hours. I think 06z/18z go to 180 hours and 00z/12z go much further out.
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