BoltWX - legit or too good to be true?

[MaryinColorado]

I'm not super techy, and I'm not a meteorologist. A friend brought this site/service to my attention and asked me my thoughts about it. My gut reaction (fair or unfair) was skepticism, and my secondary reaction was, "Whoa! This is really cool if it works."

Those of you that love digging into stuff like this, how do you vet the legitimacy of something like this? and potential accuracy? It doesn't go into detail about weather models used (at least not that I could find). From a strictly functional perspective, I want to say it's brilliant if it works. But weather is a beast, and I would never put my trust in something like this without knowing how to vet it thoroughly.

https://www.boltwx.com

[Jon Frohlich]

Maybe I'm missing something but I can already request weather forecasts with my Inreach. I'm not sure I understand why this would be any better. If it's free then who's running it? If it's just using the regular forecast models then wouldn't it be virtually the same as the Inreach forecast?

Maybe someone more savvy has a better idea of why this exists.

[k_fergie]

I looked briefly because I was intrigued, and skeptical. Garmin already natively does this for most of their equipment, but they use something called MeteoBlue now I think, and its absolutely trash, I'd rather not receive a forecast. It basically sends you an Aspen city forecast if you're up on Maroon Peak, useless obviously.

BoltWX uses the 12km resolution NAM (if you successfully transfer your GPS location and its in the NAM range) or the 28 km resolution GFS if you aren't in a NAM zone. That's directly from the FAQ section of their site. They may do more stuff on their end, but it doesn't list it. If they don't do anything beyond sending you a NAM forecast, I am failing to see a high-adoption use case for this, though its probably better than the Garmin one. In any case, if you can pick up cell service, these forecasts (and many more, better ones) can be loaded quickly from numerous websites. Its pretty rare that we are out of cell service continuously for over 3.5 days. The NAM and GFS are not particularly high resolution, and there are significantly better models out there for high resolution mountain weather in my opinion, maybe they could add those in the future.

[ekalina]

BoltWX uses the 12km resolution NAM (if you successfully transfer your GPS location and its in the NAM range) or the 28 km resolution GFS if you aren't in a NAM zone. That's directly from the FAQ section of their site. They may do more stuff on their end, but it doesn't list it. If they don't do anything beyond sending you a NAM forecast, I am failing to see a high-adoption use case for this, though its probably better than the Garmin one. In any case, if you can pick up cell service, these forecasts (and many more, better ones) can be loaded quickly from numerous websites.

+1. I question any service that's basing its output on the NAM, which is in the process of being deprecated by NOAA. Although it's higher resolution than the GFS, its model physics are inferior, so it tends to give more detailed solutions of a less likely outcome. If you're going to provide output directly from a model, it should be based on the HRRR, which is NOAA's 3-km resolution, short-term forecast model. It only runs 48 hours into the future (at most), but it's the most accurate and detailed weather model for short-term forecasts. Even better, all of these automated forecast services (e.g., mountain-forecast.com) ought to base their product on the actual NOAA forecast for a given location, which combines all of the weather model output with an actual human's understanding of meteorology and individual model biases. If you have access to the internet, I always recommend getting a forecast from weather.gov. Your tax dollars have already paid for it and it's truly money well spent. Anything else is mostly derivative in nature.

[seano]

If you have access to the internet, I always recommend getting a forecast from weather.gov. Your tax dollars have already paid for it and it's truly money well spent. Anything else is mostly derivative in nature.

+1!

Too many of these services just wrap the NOAA forecast in ads, or tweak it in some ill-considered and poorly-described way (mountain-forecast is particularly bad). I personally find Meteoblue and ECMWF useful as well, especially comparing them to NOAA to see if there’s a consensus.

Bottom line: look for a precise description of what they’re doing, and ask yourself if it adds much to the data put out by the few organizations that can afford the supercomputers, satellites, and ground stations to make a real forecast.

[Briere]

This tool seems very straight forward to stand up and relatively cheap to maintain.

I would guess based on the FAQ about cost "BoltWX is currently available to private users at no cost." that once enough people sign up a cost will be added. Setting it free initially gets in users it wouldn't otherwise. Of course, all Garmin needs to do is actually fix the weather check and this is pointless then.

[MidsizeAl]

I looked briefly because I was intrigued, and skeptical. Garmin already natively does this for most of their equipment, but they use something called MeteoBlue now I think, and its absolutely trash, I'd rather not receive a forecast. It basically sends you an Aspen city forecast if you're up on Maroon Peak, useless obviously.

Perhaps they have updated things, but I don't think this is true of Meteoblue any longer. Using your example:

Screenshot 2024-07-11 110127.jpg

Screenshot 2024-07-11 110116.jpg

I still trust Weather.gov far more than any other forecasting service, but if Garmin uses Meteoblue (even with it only having a 3-hr resolution on my inReach), I'd be willing to trust it for the most part when outside of cell service.

Just an anecdote, but I pulled a forecast through Garmin while backpacking one morning this summer, then, when I got a few bars of service on the peak we were climbing, I loaded the Weather.gov version. They were pretty close to each other, though the Garmin/Meteoblue version showed precipitation arriving a couple hours earlier in the day than NOAA/NWS. NOAA/NWS was pretty much right on the money, but Garmin was not far off.

I'm always a little skeptical of anything offered for free, but if BoltWX starts using HRRR, I'd probably give it a try. I'm happy with what's available for now, though.

[k_fergie]

I looked briefly because I was intrigued, and skeptical. Garmin already natively does this for most of their equipment, but they use something called MeteoBlue now I think, and its absolutely trash, I'd rather not receive a forecast. It basically sends you an Aspen city forecast if you're up on Maroon Peak, useless obviously.

Perhaps they have updated things, but I don't think this is true of Meteoblue any longer. /cut

I still trust Weather.gov far more than any other forecasting service, but if Garmin uses Meteoblue (even with it only having a 3-hr resolution on my inReach), I'd be willing to trust it for the most part when outside of cell service.

Just an anecdote, but I pulled a forecast through Garmin while backpacking one morning this summer, then, when I got a few bars of service on the peak we were climbing, I loaded the Weather.gov version. They were pretty close to each other, though the Garmin/Meteoblue version showed precipitation arriving a couple hours earlier in the day than NOAA/NWS. NOAA/NWS was pretty much right on the money, but Garmin was not far off.

I'm always a little skeptical of anything offered for free, but if BoltWX starts using HRRR, I'd probably give it a try. I'm happy with what's available for now, though.

Yeah, my example was from 2020, so it could definitely be better now; really anything would be better. The Meteoblue website forecast seems decent, I just played around with it. I know that Garmin have not always used Meteoblue. All I know is that the forecast I received from Garmin was laughably bad and I have not even tried to use one since. I had no service for decent sections of my CT thru hike and elected to predict the weather myself rather than pulling a Garmin one. Like you, I use weather.gov for basically everything. I pair it with CAIC WRF for snow in Colorado, though I find CAIC WRF does tend to overpredict snow totals (and weather.gov underpredict) under a good chunk of storm setups.

[BoltWX]

I just came across this thread and, as the developer of BoltWX, can provide some insight into how it works.

First up, thanks for your perspectives on what would make the service more useful, it's really helpful to hear from people who are using these tools on a regular basis. I found the default InReach weather forecasts next to useless in the PNW mountains and would often message friends for a proper forecast. When I started asking around the mountain sports community, it turned out this was a common problem, and so BoltWX was born.

To answer a couple of questions that came up:

• BoltWX is summarizing the forecast data into a format that can be accessed on an InReach, iPhone or similar satellite device whilst in the backcountry. It doesn’t do any prediction or modelling of its own, but there is quite a bit involved in automatically summarizing forecasts reliably.

• As a couple of you pointed out, high-resolution, near-term models such as HRRR and the Canadian HRDPS models are really useful in the backcountry, especially for shorter trips. These are now available on BoltWX and there are instructions in the FAQ for how to access them: https://www.boltwx.com/index#FAQ

• We’ve also added wildfire and avalanche information for US (including Colorado). Details on that are in the FAQ too.

• Who would use it? For a lot of people the standard Garmin forecasts are sufficient, and for those that need a bit more detail or are in areas where they’re out of cell service for longer periods, there’s BoltWX.

Thanks again for your comments, happy to answer any other questions you have!