Also, as a person with experience sailing on the Bay, this model immediately seems unusually accurate. It shows, for example, the Angel Island wind shadow moving around correctly as it does during the day, which I have never seen in another model.
Could anyone with more understanding of meteorology (or OP) please explain what is different about this model vs say the ECMWF model that you can see in apps like Windy, that are supposedly great, but just don't seem to get these features right? Those models are incredibly bad when dealing with the unusual local geographic features on the bay. What resolution are they operating at?
Thanks for the feedback :) The highest resolution models you can currently find on windy is around 3x3 km (HRRR) and this resolution is unfortunately too big to capture fine terrain and water features. 300x300 gives you 100 times more data points to work with.
How often are you planning to re-run this model? Can I convince you to rerun it before this weekend? I'm in a situation to get you a lot of new followers/users if I had a new model for Sat/Sun.
It's purely spatial resolution and the representation of topography that high-resolution simulation permits. Any NWP model like WRF or WRF-LES will produce topographic-driven wind fields with high fidelity pretty much out of the box, without any customization required. The result may be pretty, but it's really nothing of note from a weather modeling perspective.
ECMWF's model is 9km spatial resolution, so Angel Island probably doesn't even show up in the model domain.
Could anyone with more understanding of meteorology (or OP) please explain what is different about this model vs say the ECMWF model that you can see in apps like Windy, that are supposedly great, but just don't seem to get these features right? Those models are incredibly bad when dealing with the unusual local geographic features on the bay. What resolution are they operating at?