New weather site

For those that don't follow weatherwatch, they have started a ruralwatch for weather forecasting all the way down to rural towns and suburbs.
The amount of data available is huge.

You can find it here if you're interested :D

Just use yr.no

or use windy.com

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Originally Posted by Gibo

Just use yr.no

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yep. That's all I've used for a while.

I find yr.no pretty good for rainfall predictions, but it generally underestimates wind by a fair margin. Metvuw.com another good one for longer range forecast as long as you can interpret weather maps yourself.

So, serious question. What makes one weather website better than the other?

All my hunting buddies down in the central North Island swear by yr.no, but how can a Norwegian website be better at forecasting the weather in NZ than our own Metservice?

Do they have their own meteorologists pouring over the weather maps and deciding well this is what is going to do? Or do they have better algorithms in a big computer somewhere? Is it really better i.e. more accurate? The first time I looked at the Raetihi forecast on yr.no, sometime ago now, I worked out it was actually the Waiouru forecast, which can be completely different on that side of the mountain.

My mates say "oh well it looks at more local weather stations" than the Metservice. What would a weather station tell you about the weather in the future? It can only tell you what happened in the past surely.

All day the forecast on the Metservice website for that area has been different to yr.no. The Met service is forecasting worse weather.

Any weather experts out there that can explain this to me, it would be appreciated.

Forecasting is a bit of hit and miss but many major storms are forecast and typhoons/hurricanes tracked which has saved countless lives in the process.
I don't trust metservice further than I can throw them. Weatherwatch is generally more accurate.

Now the science of it is apparently quite involved but in essence, forecasters monitor weather fronts, low pressure and high pressure to determine what our weather is going to do. Humidity, sea temperatures, wind speed/direction and pressure (plus a few other entities) makes predictions pretty accurate for the experienced climatologist. That said, they do get it wrong from time to time.

Last weeks storm that hit down south was predicted by Weatherwatch a week before it hit. NIWA said its a waste of time, storm in a tea cup blah blah. 3 days later metservice and NIWA changed their mind and agreed with Weatherwatch. Bit of a pissing contest going on between them at the moment.

yr.no and a few others are accurate but I would be more inclined to go with a local weather guy and on top of that, the rural site gives more info like fog and snow.

I am not a climatologist but just enjoy the citizen science side of it.

I find Yr.No comparable to METVUW, and there was a time when Dr.Jim's METVUW was a go-to for long-range predictions, even when the MetService also had their 7-day maps online. Windy.com is now out in front of the others by a country mile in terms of the level of detail I need. All my hunting and range trips now either happen or get called off based on windy.com. Though none of them can predict localised air movement around steep terrain. Better to try and build up a history of how weather-wind direction and speed predictions broken into the altitude gradations of 150 metres will translate into what will be experienced on the ground in the areas being hunted. Windy.com has enough detail so I can estimated ahead of time whether there will be wind in my face at key observation points or for stalking down certain faces, or if the wind will be backing and a change of planned route is called for. The hourly cloud-base predictions have proved to be pretty useful too for planning high-altitude slip stake-outs, again with slight tweaking for local conditions to avoid white-outs. Windy.com: recommended.

I have been using windguru for the last 15 years.( for kitesurfing and skydiving and. Now days for hunting and fishing as well)
Rain is most of the time coming pushed by wind .
Prediction within 3 days are pretty accurate. 5 days not too bad.