How to use The Wind Master: a guide to the site

This site is not a bulletin: it is a tool for deciding whether to load the car. Five minutes spent understanding what it actually shows are worth it, because the numbers come from different places and are not all worth the same.

The verdict: go or no go

On every spot the colour answers one question: right now, with your threshold and your sport, is it worth going? The verdict comes from wind actually measured by the stations, not from the forecast. When no fresh real reading exists, the verdict says so and falls back to the model estimate.

You set the threshold yourself: a wing beginner and an experienced kiter do not share the same idea of what counts as enough wind.

Where the numbers come from

The wind shown as current comes from one real station, not from an average across sources: the primary one if it is less than ten minutes old, otherwise the first fresh one available. If all of them are stale, the value is the model and it is labelled as an estimate.

Every station is named on the credits page: almost all of them belong to amateur networks and to people who publish their measurements for free.

The forecast: what it is and what it is worth

The next 48 hours are not the raw model: they are recomputed for the spot, correcting the model with what the anemometers there actually measured under the same conditions, and learning from past errors. Beyond 48 hours the horizon reaches seven days, but there the number helps you pick the day, not the hour.

In the table each column is a different model: when they agree you can trust them, when they disagree the day is uncertain and it is worth checking again in the morning.

Pressure and the lake regimes

On Lake Garda the thermal wind does not come from nowhere: the pressure difference between the north and the south of the basin foreshadows the Pelèr in the morning and the Ora in the afternoon. That is what the barometric chart is for, and the lines every six hours help place the timing.

Thunderstorms

The wind ahead of a storm arrives before the rain and can go from five to thirty knots in two minutes, often reversing completely. If an active cell is within ten kilometres and tracking towards the spot, the time to head in has already passed.

Be told, instead of checking

You can get the morning briefing and an alert when a spot turns on. That is the one thing the site cannot do on its own: watch on your behalf.

What this site does not do

It does not decide for you. Forecasts are good but not infallible, an anemometer can be sheltered or out of calibration, and no data replaces what you see when you get to the spot. If the lake says one thing and the screen another, the lake is right.