Wind Maps and forecasts

[AlanL]

Doing some idle searches on extreme wind conditions in the Columbia River Gorge last night and I stumbled across a wind surfer web site that has active wind conditions all over the place. They have gathered a whole bunch of small weather stations onto their web site so wind surfers could find nice places to play that is also a gold mine for drone pilots who want to know what the conditions are like at least at ground level. This is not going to give you flight conditions 400' in the air but does give a general idea of what to expect in the area you wish to fly. Wind surfers don't care as much about what is going on above their heads while they are playing on the water surface.

I have had a Davis weather station at my house for over a decade and I recall getting an email once from a wind surfer asking if they could tap my Weather Underground feed for their web site but that was quite a few years ago and I never thought about what they did with it until I started looking at the interactive maps on this web site. Sure enough they have my station on their maps as a reference for folks wind surfing on Vancouver Lake.

Wind Finder

The map in this case is centered on the Columbia River Gorge since I fly up there a lot but coverage is quite extensive on their interactive map. I did a quick search but didn't any posts on here that referenced this web site so I though it might help some folks out.

 

[Yaros]

I use Windy website to track wind, additionally I also use UAV Forecast on my phone to check weather conditions before flying.

 

[AlanL]

I use Windy website to track wind, additionally I also use UAV Forecast on my phone to check weather conditions before flying.

I do as well but neither of those help me with places with highly localized wind info near the ground like the Columbia River Gorge.

I have several other weather sources and check those too but my thinking is that you can never have too much weather info

 

[cporter]

I use weatherunderground.com. They have a wind map the covers the US and also several home weather stations. With those speed may be accurate but a lot don’t have the direction properly oriented.

 

[AlanL]

I use weatherunderground.com. They have a wind map the covers the US and also several home weather stations. With those speed may be accurate but a lot don’t have the direction properly oriented.

The link I put in for the windsurfers is actually using quite a few weather underground sites for their map including mine. As I mentioned above I have a Davis weather station at my house and have been on wunderground.com for 10 years now. I use it every day for my local weather.

Not quite sure where they found them but Wind Finder has quite a few more wind data point locations than weather underground at least for the places I typically fly which is why I though others might want take a look.