Hi all,
Adam creator of Winter Climbing Forecasts here. Just to respond to a couple of the points raised on the thread.
"I think a much simpler system could be more useful. Obviously climbers want to know about specific routes but maybe a forecast by corrie/route type would work better."
So this has been a feature on the app for a couple of seasons now. Summary charts of areas with the type of routes predicted in condition. Had some great feedback on this.
"I couldn't sort routes in to 5 condition categories when standing beneath them so I've no idea how an app could do that in any meaningful way."
This was a conscious design decision. The prelaunch app had just three categories, but it was decided five worked better for tracking the progress of water-ice routes slowly forming, but knowing that level of granularity was a trade off on other route types.
You could just view the original three categories as terrible, poor/marginal and reasonable/good, if you wish. The app effectively does this when you look at the summary or filter what's in condition, as it does them on reasonable/good.
"Another is the route details which I think have been incorrectly entered in a lot of places. There are clearly a whole lot of other inputs whose accuracy is unclear or questionable"
Totally baseless.
"It's not wholly inaccurate, it gets the easy calls right most of the time, but then you don't need it for the easy calls. When it comes to the harder calls, I found it to be frequently wrong at both ends of the scale."
Behind the scenes the models have constantly improved and are totally different to four seasons ago. The key difference now is the amount of user feedback confirming where the predictions were right and where they were not. Thanks to the community heavily using this feature, the total now numbers into the tens of thousands and the forecasts are only going to get better and better as time goes on.
New to this season just gone was fine-tuning the model every night on this data, so any feedback say on the Friday would be reflected in Saturday's forecasts. Lots of positive comments from the community on this too.
"It's almost useless."
Anyone who follows WCF closely will be aware Dave has been a extremely vocal critic since the start. However, the vast majority of the community has been very supportive and regularly feedback to me how useful they find the tool. So thank you all for that.
See you all at the start of next season...
Adam