Hi All,
To answer a question which seems to have come up, WXSIMATE WILL read your local data from WD, even if it’s not registered. What it WON’T do until you register it, is to cull data for your specific site. It can’t, because to do that it would need all your site data, which is what I develop in the process of customizing it for you.
I think one source of confusion is simply that it’s hard to realize at first what the program is. It’s a ‘local interactive atmospheric model’ - not that there are any others. It’s not intended as an auxiliary tool for WD, as I didn’t even know about WD till a couple of years ago, and over 20 years into the development of WXSIM. The tie in with WD is nice and convenient, but is actually a rather small part of using WXSIM.
Those tutorials in the manual were in response to requests for users, and many people have found them quite helpful. It does take a lot of patience to work through them, but I think learning the program is quite worthwhile.
Something that only a few users realize at first is the value (and fun, really) of using it in a ‘play’ mode. Even with the demo, you can pick one of the four sample sites, or enter latitude, longitude, and elevation, etc. data for anywhere in the world, and run all kinds of experiments. You can make cold fronts come through in Sydney in July or watch the sea breeze effect shift the wind there during the day in January, put snow on the ground in Atlanta in July and see how long it takes to melt, play with surface and upper air temperatures to see under what conditions various types of freezing or frozen precipitation occur, compare windy clear days to calm clear days - or to cloudy days, to see how that affects the daily temperature range. Of course, you can also make a serious, accurate forecast with all kinds of detailed information you’d rarely find elsewhere, which for most people is the main point. I just think you’ll get a much better feel for it if you play around with it and enjoy it, instead of trying to get all the features working at first. It can be run in a very simple mode.
I think it’s very instructive to read the background of the program, both at www.wxsim.com and in the manual. Also, I recommend taking a look at the cty.fdt file (it’s plain text), to see what all goes into customizing it. I develop data like that for each site I do.
Oh, be sure to click on any blue word in the program which you don’t understand. Instant help on that exact topic will pop up.
Hope that helps!
Tom