Alef Arendsen

I was checking out the wind this morning. It is promising to be a great week. Although I typically don’t like easterly winds (it forces me to kiteboard out on the lakes instead of the sea, and I don’t like that), but then again, it usually offers some nice room for tricks. Anyway, I was checking out the winds and came across this actual:

A bit weird huh, to have gusts that are lower than the actual wind .

I typically use a few sites for forecasting. For the long and mid-term forecasts, I typically use Windfinder.com, offering a 7-day forecast that roughly gives you an outlook where the wind is going to be. They also offer a 3-day Super Forecast, which is a lot more accurate than the 7-day forecast. Last season the Super Forecast was really accurate, but somehow this season that has changed a bit. With winds from the Westerly direction (NW-W-SW), the forecast is quite accurate, although a bit on the low side, but when winds are from the East, the forecasts gets worse.

I double check things sometimes with Windguru, another world-wide wind forecast site. Forecasts are typically quite accurate here as well and they offer quite a variety of forecast using different techniques and models.

For the Dutch sailors / kiteboarders / windsurfers there’s Vliegerweer.nl which offers a nice Google map with a layover… Quite a nice site too, although I don’t use it a lot.

For the intra-day forecast, I use the KNMI (Dutch Weather Institute) forecast for the small aviation (KNMI Weerulletin Kleine Luchtvaart). This forecast is really accurate and also offer an insight into which weather systems are passing through. It’s quite important o know about those, as was proven last weekend, with a big system passing through, with unexpected gusts of more than 50 knots. During these gusts, a guy died at Strand Horst.

Last but not least, I use a site called Actuelewaterdata for actuals on the same day. They only have actuals for a few places out on the North Sea (wind speed, direction), but this is good enough.

Combining all of the above offers me enough data to see whether or not I should go out and where… So far I haven’t had a lot of days that I went in vain…

If you have more sites that provide good info, please leave a comment!