Wind Forecasting?

[Joeprunc]

Just curious what everyone uses to look at the future day's wind on the water? We recently moved to a new location, and it seems like weather.com and accuweather.com provide a very misrepresenting wind forecast model.

I started using windalert.com, but still not completely satisfied with the forecasts.

[Bakes5]

I use "The Weather Channel.com Max" iphone app. Not really very representative of future wind conditions and hit or miss on the days wind. I've found the best predictor of anything weather related is generally the trend. For example, if the hourly chance of rain is 0, 10,10, 20, 40 then I feel that the chance of rain is higher than if it is 30,30,30,30,30. I also look at wind speeds by the hour. If the general trend shows increasing wind speeds then I figure it is going to be windy.

I think I have only bailed a couple of times for wind and those were the times there was a severe wind advisory for small craft.

As a rule, rivers are far more forgiving of wind than lakes

[NICKYPOO]

Wunderground dude. Get the detailed hourly forecast for any zip code that includes temp, wind direction and speed predictions for every three hours. There's a lot of info on there. Great model section as well. I've used those to predict weather two weeks before the air races for a couple teams. I've nailed it the last two years. It's the best westcoast network by far.

[Timmy!]

I want to get one of those portable weather stations and figure out how to set it up in my buddy's camper that is kept out at our lake (55 miles away). I was thinking it would be cool if I could hook it up to a pre-paid cell phone and a solar panel so that I could call the phone and figure out what the conditions are. The lake is in the middle of nowhere...
Or if I could figure out how to post the data from there to Wunderground too - that would be cool since the closest weather station is 8 miles away.

[NICKYPOO]

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/...weekday=Friday

http://www.wunderground.com/modelmap...=NAM&domain=US

[NICKYPOO]

You can select which particular station you want as well.

Viva la Wunderground!

[Joeprunc]

I'll give wunderground.com a try weather.com says its 15 mph, Wunderground says 8-10. Thanks Nick.

@ Timmy, I can look out my office window and see if the water is good or not. But was more thinking of when friends try to plan on heading out for a weekend or not.

[NICKYPOO]

Enjoy. I love that site. Hopefully it will serve you as well as it has me.

[Ewok]

http://aviationweather.gov/adds/tafs/

Look up the METAR and TAF for the closest airport. For Discovery Bay, CA that is Stockton Municipal. Type KCSK in the airport code block, click on translated button and get TAF and METAR. The Terminal Area Forecast (TAF) is a better 24hr forecast, the METAR is current conditions.