franksingleton
Well-Known Member
UKV, wherever you get it from should be as good as it gets for short period detail. It and AROME should be the best for our part of the world. HARMONIE, run on a slightly longer grid is also good. If the weather situation is mobile, then the value of LAMs over larger grid lengths will be minimal. If you look at the area modelled, that is pretty obvious. For much of the time LAMs will give no more information than a global model. They should, in principle, introduce topographical effects but these are heavily dependent on getting the large scale patterns ie wind direction, speed and cloud cover right.
That is why the Windy.com comparison reverts to global models. It used to go back to the GFS when I last used it.
If you think about your sailing experience, coastal or longer passages, you will know just how variable weather can be. Look at output from LAMs and the uniformity of the wind is simply not realistic. The smoothing is obvious.
PS. UKV and AROME compute on grids of about 1.5 km. HARMONIE uses a 2.5 km grid.
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