Weather & Flight
Drone Weather Confidence
How much do the weather models agree about your wind? Compare ECMWF, GFS and ICON for any hour.
Planning aid only — not certified flight-planning software or airspace clearance. Always verify results against your own aircraft's manual and check current regulations before flying. Full disclaimer.
Model agreement is not a probability: two models can agree and both be wrong, and local effects are too small for any of them. Always compare the wind with your aircraft's limit.
What this tool shows
Most drone weather pages give you one number and one verdict. This tool shows how much three independent weather models agree about the same hour: ECMWF IFS (Europe), NOAA GFS (USA) and DWD ICON (Germany). It lists each model's wind and gust, the range between them, and a confidence level.
It answers a different question from "is it safe to fly?". It answers "how much should I trust the forecast I'm looking at?" That matters most when you are planning ahead, because a client shoot, a survey day or a long drive to site all depend on a forecast that can still change.
How confidence is worked out
For each hour the tool compares the models' 10 m wind and 10 m gust. The level follows the wider of the two ranges, because gusts are what end flights and models disagree about them more than about average wind.
| Range between the models | Confidence | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| up to 2 m/s (7 km/h) | High | The models broadly agree. Plan on the middle value. |
| 2 to 4 m/s (7 to 14 km/h) | Medium | Some disagreement. Plan on the higher value and keep a margin. |
| more than 4 m/s (14 km/h) | Low | The models disagree. Treat the forecast as a range, not a number. |
The "Next 24 hours" card shows the least confident hour in the day ahead, and tells you which hour it is. A day is only as trustworthy as its shakiest hour.
A real example
On 1 October 2026 at 12:00 local time, a check for Athens gave these 10 m values:
| Model | Wind | Gust |
|---|---|---|
| ECMWF IFS | 28 km/h | 64 km/h |
| NOAA GFS | 52 km/h | 60 km/h |
| DWD ICON | 30 km/h | 71 km/h |
The models differ by about 23 km/h on average wind, so confidence is Low. A page that showed only the GFS value would have told a pilot the wind was almost twice as strong as the other two models suggest. Seeing all three tells you the real situation: it will be windy, and nobody knows exactly how windy.
On a settled day the same three models are often within a few km/h of each other. That is High confidence, and it is the kind of day when a forecast made the evening before is worth acting on.
How to use it
- Planning days ahead. Check the day you care about. If confidence is low, don't commit to anything expensive. Look again the evening before and again in the morning.
- Choosing between hours. Use the hour picker. Confidence often improves or worsens through the day, so the best hour is sometimes the one the models agree on, not the one with the lowest single number.
- Deciding how much margin to keep. On a low-confidence hour, judge the flight against the highest model value, not the middle one.
- Sharing with a client or colleague. "Copy link" gives a page for that place and hour that anyone can open without an account. It always shows the current forecast, never a stale snapshot, and says when it was updated.
What this does not tell you
- It is model agreement, not a probability. Two models can agree and both be wrong, for example when a local sea breeze or a valley wind is too small for any of them to resolve. High confidence is not a guarantee.
- It covers wind at 10 m only. It says nothing about rain, visibility, temperature or Kp. Use the flight condition checker and the rain radar for those.
- It does not know your aircraft. Compare the numbers with your drone's own wind limit using the drone wind calculator, and check wind at altitude for the height you will really fly at.
To understand why forecasts differ in the first place, read why weather apps show different wind forecasts.