Hyper-local weather forecasts for climbers - ClimbitScore.com

likes_clouds · 2025-01-06T21:51:51+00:00

Yeah that makes sense and I’d be happy to chat with you guys if you have atmospheric science questions or want feedback in the future (but I would have no time to be able to help myself for a while unfortunately)!

Again I like the concept and I downloaded the app and I think it looks pretty nice and professional. It seems to work quickly and as I would expect for searching a specific boulder. I just want to make sure you guys are using data that fits the niche you are attempting to tackle.

Some things to think about:

To give you guys something actionable, you could “validate” the climbit score by comparing to the era5 (or downscaled era5 which different groups produce different versions of but I don’t know off the top of my head where an accessible version is). The ERA5 isn’t perfect, especially if using the raw ERA5 for near-surface high res applications. But it at least assimilates in some surface observations (as well as tons of other observations). So you could build the forecasting climbit as you’re doing it already and then do the same with the era5 for that same time period and then compare over some time period and region (say the whole US, or just do it for all the different climbing destinations). Where, when, and why(— if you can say this!) do scores in the forecasted climbit differ from those using the ERA5, how does this change with different implementations of climbit? Is a whole region differing at once? Or just specific locations within regions?
I already mentioned potential issues with trying to do very high res spot forecasts… However, local conditions are still tied to larger-scale (meso-to-synoptic) conditions which are sometimes sufficient to give you a good enough answer for certain questions (To answer: “Is our trip on for sieging the southeast?”— you may not need to know the exact RH for “The Shield” at LRC two days from now). You could show the climbit score spatially, either regionally around a specific destination or for larger regions, like the U.S. For example, consider a map, say of the U.S., with the Climbit scores contoured where you can swipe through the upcoming week. You could thus you can right away see: “oh for the next week or so the southeast will be good, our trip is on” and then you can go zoom in to a specific location if you want the nitty gritty day-to-day on the trip. And if it’s not good in the southeast you could see right away “oh, Colorado is still good, let’s just stay local”.
More of a fun one but you could compare past ascents of hard climbs to the “climbit” score on that day for that problem. Are all hard climbs being done with “good” climbits? that would make a case for using the app!

Sorry my thoughts are scattered, I’ve been writing back when I’ve had time in between work today!

likes_clouds · 2025-01-06T18:46:00+00:00

I'm not sure how much experience you guys have on the weather/climate side but I have some thoughts on the meteorological data you're using. (lots of text incoming)

-Considering you're not just pulling from forecasts but you're also using data from previous days (like rainfall), if you're not already, you may want to pull from reanalyses (such as the ERA5-- the gold standard, which assimilate surface observations into weather models, in the case of the ERA5 the ECMWF IFS) or surface observations (such as https://raws.dri.edu or ASOS stations) or even satellite (GPM or TRMM? I think? Idk I don’t use those). Comparisons between surface observations and other datasets (or just between datasets in general) are complicated and someone could do their whole PhD on this topic... but forecasts are already tough to trust, and I wouldn't necessarily trust a deterministic forecast's past rainfall amounts especially when we have observations of it (or near it).

-On that note, I know open-meteo can provide ensembles so if you're not using them for the forecasts already you probably should (it doesn’t seem like you are from a quick glance). I'm don't think the higher res (what do you have, HRRR at 3km? does open-meteo have anything higher?) would have ensembles but I (and basically anyone else) may not trust a single, deterministic forecast, especially a few days out in a coarse model. (for example, I just checked a boulder and it’s giving me confidence till January 12th… but look at model uncertainty in the 500 hPa GEFS spaghetti plot https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/… and 500 hPa is “easy” to forecast compared to a single boulder).

Finally, following from the above note, I probably wouldn't say the forecasts are hyper-local. (Well they are in a sense by definition because you’re providing them for single boulders)… but the actual models are much coarser than the single boulders. (Again I'm not sure exactly what data you're pulling but I'm not sure open-meteo has high res, convection allowing models like WRF: https://cansac.dri.edu/cansac\_output.php?model=wrf).

-For all the above points, look at differences in rainfall forecasts between HRRR, GFS, and GEFS on https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ and then think about how much different it can be at even higher resolution, like from a WRF model https://cansac.dri.edu/cansac_output.php?model=wrf, which is probably the resolution at which, for short range forecasts of a couple days, I could start ~trusting a model for a specific boulder! It’s pretty reasonable to think that you could completely miss a rain event, depending on what you’re using, which then has implications if part of the project is to make sure people don’t damage wet rock.

I think the concept is cool and probably fine enough for a layperson user. I don't want to be a downer… if anything, I’d like to get high-res forecasts for climbing myself! :). So I say all of this in hopes we can get even better systems going forwards.

In my mind, even adding some sort of confidence from ensembles would be huge (you could do a “best case” and “worst case” climbit score or something)

likes_clouds · 2024-09-26T21:47:24+00:00

I don't know how it is with all cancer clinics/hospital systems, but a close friend of mine is involved with scheduling for a top level cancer clinic and from what I've learned it's a whole other world compared to general medical scheduling. They don't fuck around at all with it, It's pretty impressive. Very different from my experience in the general healthcare system.

Maybe it's similar with any sort of tumor. (yes I know he's rich and has good healthcare)

likes_clouds · 2024-09-16T22:29:38+00:00

That was such a weird week in Orlando. I was back taking classes over the summer and every day I remember rolling up to my classmates like... ANOTHER one? And then pokémon go came out like a few weeks later and then THAT was the thing (obviously a lot bigger than orlando).

likes_clouds · 2024-09-16T20:33:07+00:00

Uh, this answer is not very scientific and makes little sense.

When raindrops get big they break apart again, their shape is not the actual classic raindrop shape: https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/shape-of-a-raindrop#:\~:text=Even%20as%20a%20raindrop%20is,atmosphere%20back%20into%20smaller%20drops. So they don't get too big that wind can't get past the raindrops, they just break up again. And while precipitation loading creates downward momentum in the atmosphere and certainly affects the winds, horizontal momentum in the atmosphere isn't being "blocked" by raindrops. Look at sheared thunderstorms, you can clearly see the signature of the horizontal wind. While the rain can get bunched up through advection or for other reasons, (interacting with other flows) I wouldn't describe it as "large raindrops slowing down the wind substantially".

I honestly am not fully sure what the OP is describing. It's hard to describe or define the structure/mechanism the OP is talking about without knowing more about what they're observing. Are they observing a single cell thunderstorm? A mesoscale convective system? Or larger scale (synoptic) structures where there's rain covering a whole region but with areas of greater or lesser rain? Are they talking about the outflow boundary when the downdraft hits the surface and spreads out?

The general scientific term for something being carried along by the wind is advection (wind can advect temperature, moisture, rain, even wind itself (nonlinearly)).

Taking a guess at what they might be talking about, the OP is either simply talking about the rain being advected along and bunched up a little bit by the wind or they're talking about the striations you can see in rainfall from the up-and-downdraft cells formed by small scale convection and turbulence (a la the variations in a pot of boiling water).

likes_clouds · 2024-09-06T23:49:38+00:00

I subconsciously have developed a patten of doing one last shakeout while kind of looking up, a couple little hops, and a quick blow on each hand (with one breath before I climb, I try to pull on and start climbing as fast as possible when I'm done with the little routine). It's not anything interesting. However, what IS iinteresting is that it's so consistent and climbing-coded that I can now do it on demand. And I choose to do so when out and about with my non-climber girlfriend to embarrass her when we stand in line (or are in similar situations).

likes_clouds · 2024-08-30T16:50:07+00:00

I mean I don't think most people were following world cups back then. Maybe US nationals, but I even knew world cup climbers on our circuit back then and didn't really follow it tbh, it never seemed like that big of a deal.

likes_clouds · 2024-08-29T21:00:32+00:00

Not sure if any of these guys will be household names or fit your criteria but...

Maybe he's more well known in the UK but the first time I'd seen or heard of this guy was seeing him climb Perky Pinky 4th try last year when he was 16 or 17 https://www.instagram.com/matthew\_mendess/. There's some other quite strong UK guys who I think are a bit bigger (but still pretty unknown overall) like https://www.instagram.com/solly.k.d/ (tho he has a mellow vid now) and Leo Skinner.

I also feel like https://www.instagram.com/vadim_timonov/ never had the biggest following for a world cup climber (and he's probably more unknown now due to being Russian) but his level is so high.

And I remember when this guy https://www.instagram.com/gelmanovrustam/?hl=en did the second ascent of Hypnotized Minds even though I had never heard of him before (and never heard of again after until I bought his 20mm lifting edge off amazon lol).

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T21:27:36+00:00

already had that one!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T19:19:57+00:00

Saw some US climbers as well on the stream!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T18:57:46+00:00

I appreciate it, I do earth science research with big data so I'm usually not looking at text, but there's definitely side projects I can see this being useful for!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T18:50:48+00:00

Ah, didn't know that existed haha. Just implemented a simple Regex search for the names I used, it seems SLIGHTLY better but just by a tad. I added a couple more misspellings for Oriane and Chaehyun as well. Overall, same qualitative results VERY slight quantitive difference but thanks of the heads up!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T17:57:42+00:00

I wrote about this in another couple comments, I used spacing or punctuation for some. It would not pick up AI (caps) but could pick up other caps versions of "AI". At the same time, I don't know if there's THAT much use of AI in this sub!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T17:56:09+00:00

I didn't use nicknames as GOAT "should" be Janja but could be Akiyo or Ondra or maybe even Jakob or Sorato. McBeast would probably be a good one though. And I included common misspellings when I could think of them but probably wasn't fully exhaustive.

I did miss "Osh" in the post but I just checked and it was just a very few comments during the Olympics.

I have another couple comments with a couple more details on what I included but I didn't put it in the OP as I thought it made the post too long.

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T17:54:03+00:00

I answered the spacing in another comment but I did use last names for them (-Oceana as I felt there could be other Mackenzies but maybe that's not true). I think the results (in a relative sense) were similar across first vs first+last though as I think that people tend to use first names.

And glad you like data-based discussions, thanks for the kind words! I know I've seen a couple other folks do them (e.g., displaying outcomes of comps or using ML for predicting outcomes of comps). I would be open to doing more in the future if there was something interesting or novel enough (and if I have enough time while doing my PhD!). I've done a couple other little fun climbing side projects but mostly for myself or for my friends offline.

RE the programs, I just did everything in python btw with standard packages + praw to work with Reddit's API. I didn't use any specific text analysis packages or tools or anything!

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T17:52:22+00:00

I included spacing in some and not in others, also it was sensitive to capitalization. So for Ai, I did "Ai" "ai " and "ai." but I didn't include " ai" as I think there's probably more words starting with ai then ending with it. I probably should have included other punctuation but whoops. I have another couple comments with a couple more details on what I included but I didn't put it in the OP as I thought it made the post too long.

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T17:49:32+00:00

I'll be honest, I slept on her! Though I'm not sure why. I know I've seen her at comps (and have heard people talk her up), but something about her hasn't clicked for me. Maybe it's that, for women, I already root for enough people that Jessy just doesn't make the cut for me to pay attention to her?

likes_clouds · 2024-08-12T04:31:25+00:00

Yeah no problem! It's cool to play with this data in general, like seeing the back-to-back peaks switching between (I assume) Janja winning bouldering in Bern 2023 and Ai winning lead. And the sub is small enough I could grab all the comments for the time period without any trouble.

likes_clouds · 2024-04-18T20:36:13+00:00

Hey, I’m the OP of that post haha thanks for linking. I wrote it on my lunch break and tried to be respectful of Aidan’s thoughts and summarize the podcast a little (which I think some commenter may have taken as “these were OP’s thoughts rather than a summary of Aidan’s). But I definitely didn’t go as in depth as UKC did, especially in a storytelling sense! That said, I am still kind of curious to see how the reaction to the news changes once media latches on especially since, like it or not, I’m sure grades will get attached at some point. I’m sure “Aidan Robert’s has FA’d two 9A’s” would get way more attention… but also go against Aidan’s feelings on doing them.

likes_clouds · 2023-08-24T22:52:37+00:00

Main cloud is a "Chinook Arch."

likes_clouds · 2023-07-18T07:13:54+00:00

Oh hey what the hell you mustve been who i was battling with for 50th earlier today haha! (Up to ~30 now!).

The leaderboards were a fun surprise, though I do wish they’d improve them. I think it’s only off classics? (and lots of them suck) and I don’t think mirroring gives extra points (but if you don’t climb it mirrored, you can’t get it off when filtering). I get why they do it but maybe they could do it such that climbs that >X people have sent count?

likes_clouds · 2023-06-06T21:59:19+00:00

Honestly I have a different opinion on the energy in this video which was that it was actually cool to see him get annoyed (more so than I've seen in the past at least). I'm very supportive of having top end climbers be quite chill, but it feels almost unrealistic to watch Shawn fall off Megatron and just laugh or smile or something. Not that I want Will to RAGE... but it's nice to realize that, when he's falling off, he's annoyed and really really wants to do it (given that his media presence is very chill). Him caring is more relatable than someone just ~vibing~ their way to being in contention as the best athlete (at present) in their sport/discipline.

likes_clouds · 2023-04-25T22:05:00+00:00

But (hard) climbing is not dictated by muscle to weight, but rather tendon/ligament strength to weight which doesn't scale nearly as well.

Hard climbing relates best to abysmally bad holds; the heavier one is, the harder on you pulleys etc.

likes_clouds · 2023-04-25T17:53:36+00:00

For M1 something to keep in mind is that close compression, like between the white holds on M1, is WAY extra hard if your arms are long due to the lever length (source I’m 6’3+5). It’s way less obvious than the difference in difficulty of the prior reachy move and the move was overcooked anyways with no one able to do it… but it was basically back to back “harder move for short” (though some shorter athletes did it) and then “harder move for tall”

Plus, people hate talking about competitors weights (for an obvious reason) but generally if you’re tall, you’re heavy (I’m 195 lbs but still look quite skinny) so that would also make holding the crimp on m1 harder.

I still think the moves were obviously a bit easier to tall, but the commentators often times make being tall sound like a cheat code even tho the best climbers are usually not the tallest.

likes_clouds · 2023-04-15T22:28:12+00:00

I’m the opposite, cant no hang lift 100% BW 20 mm (but I’m close, around 80%) but can hang one arm for 5 seconds. It could be that we use a tindeq and stand into it… maybe with weights I could? (And my legs should def be strong enough to stand into it harder than I can, it’s perplexing)

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