Windy.app Weather Hacks video 3: How to choose the best weather model for the spot

This is already the third video of Weather Hacks, Windy.app's YouTube channel with tips on better weather forecasting. It is on how to choose the best weather model for the spot.

The models you have in the Windy.app have high accuracy, especially for the first few days of the weather forecast. The Compare Mode of the weather models is a great overview of what is to be expected from the forecast. Plus it warns you if the weather is too unpredictable.

But if you need to go into details, you will need to select one model and ideally, it would be the best one on the spot. The big question is: how do we know which one is the best one?

Katerina Melnik, Windy.app Support Lead Manager

— Well, the first thing to do is to check which model has been updated the most recently. To do so, open any spot, scroll down the screen and click for details.

Then, you have two options:

1. If you have a lot of time on your hands and you are on the spot, the best thing to do would be to observe the weather conditions and to compare it with the weather forecast from the different weather models. That's how you will see which model has the most accurate data.

2. If you don't have a lot of time or you are not on the spot, in turn, a few things we can recommend:

Use regional models. The best thing about them is that they have a higher spatial resolution of 4 km or 8 km. So they show you the local weather effects. Something that global models that have 25 km resolution just can't do.
Ask about current weather conditions and advice in local chats. In the Windy.app they are available for almost all spots.
See which model did best in the past 10 days. To do so, open the Weather Map and click on the wind meter icon. Let's take Spain — Andalusia — Malaga (LEMG) station as an example. Here you see that compared to real-time data about wind from this particular station, the ECMWF weather model was correct 84% of the time in the past 10 days.

To quickly find the best weather model for today, you can also switch on the Live Weather Stations on the Weather Map. Now you can compare the colors of the wind forecast from the different weather models and the actual wind from the weather stations. So you change the weather model in the Weather Models Slider on the map and see which one better fits. In this case, the same ECMWF looks like the better match.

Now that you identified the best model for the spot, check that you have the correct Weather Profile with a preset of weather parameters for your particular sport or outdoor activity and look at what the overall weather conditions are. Is the temperature comfortable? Is it any rain in the forecast? What time is sunset? This would help you to choose the spot with the best conditions or the best time to go out to a certain spot.

That's all on how to choose the best weather model for the spot. You are very welcomed to Windy.app Weather Hacks video 4 on how to use the wind meters in the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don't miss a new video. See also the previous two releases:

To try all features of the Windy.app, we have mentioned in this video, subscribe to Windy.app Pro using one week promocode. Activate it on this page by the link.

Text: Katerina Melnik, Windy.app Support Lead Manager

Cover photo: Jakob Owens / Unsplash