How MoguWind Plan works

What MoguWind Plan is

MoguWind Plan is a web tool for planning cycling routes by looking at the wind you will face on every section. You give it a route (a GPX file, a route drawn on the map, or one imported from Strava) and the app shows you, kilometre by kilometre, how much wind will be at your back, in your face or sideways.

The idea is simple: wind does not affect a route uniformly. The same west wind can be a blessing in the first half and a punishment on the way back. Knowing that before leaving changes real decisions: what time to leave, which direction to take, whether to carry an extra bar, whether to pick plan A or plan B.

How to use it, step by step

1. 1. Get your route into the app

   You have three options, pick whichever you prefer:

   • Upload a GPX. Any standard GPX 1.1 works: exports from Strava, Garmin Connect, Komoot, Wikiloc, Ride With GPS, Bikemap or any bike computer. Drag the file onto the home page (or pick it via "+ New → Upload GPX") and you're done.
   • Draw the route on the map. Under "+ New → Build route" you have a click-based editor: mark the start, keep adding points and the app calculates the cycling route between them using BRouter (with profile choice: road, MTB, gravel, etc.). Undo, redo, drag points and save as a draft.
   • Import from Strava. If your routes or activities are already on Strava, connect the account once and import them with a click. We only fetch what you pick and never read anything else without your action.

2. 2. Pick when you're going to ride

   With the route loaded, you'll see three sliders at the top:

   • Day: today + the next 6 days.
   • Hour: your departure time. By default night hours are hidden, but a toggle allows them if your ride is at dawn or night.
   • Average speed: your estimated average on the flat. The app uses this to bucket kilometres into hourly windows, wind can shift two hours in and that shows on the later sections.

3. 3. Read the route like a comic strip

   Below the map there's a segmented strip: each block is a kilometre (or a chunk, depending on zoom). Colour tells you whether the wind pushes you (green) or punishes you (red). Hover a kilometre and the spot lights up on the map, with exact wind speed, direction and angle relative to your heading.

   There's also a synced elevation profile: you see in parallel how altitude and wind change. And a Reverse button that flips the route without changing its geometry, useful to decide which direction gives you the easier day.

Where the data comes from

MoguWind Plan stands on two public, open services. That's what lets us offer the tool for free without asking anything in return:

• Open-Meteo for wind forecasting. One of the best open meteo APIs out there, aggregating several numerical models (ECMWF, GFS, ICON, etc.) with hourly forecasts for the next 7 days plus a historical archive for "post-rides". Spatial resolution is ~5 km, plenty for cycling routes.
• BRouter for routing when you draw on the map. BRouter is an open-source routing engine tuned for cycling: it has specific profiles (road, MTB, gravel, trekking) and respects rural paths and bike lanes far better than Google Maps.
• OpenFreeMap for the base map tiles. OpenStreetMap data rendered by an open project.

How the wind impact is calculated

For every kilometre of the route we do three things:

1. We know when you'll be there. From your departure time and average speed we estimate the time you will reach each point. On long routes that means each segment is matched against its own hourly forecast, not a generic one.
2. We ask for the wind at that moment. Open-Meteo gives us wind speed and direction at that point and time.
3. We project the wind onto your heading. Pure tailwind adds; pure headwind subtracts; any angle in between uses the component parallel to your direction. The power loss the app displays is physical:

ΔP = 0.5 · ρ · CdA · v_ground · v_rel · (2 · v_ground + v_rel)

Where ρ is air density, CdA your aerodynamic coefficient (we use cycling-tourism typical values), v_ground your ground speed and v_rel the wind component projected onto your heading. It's the same formula serious simulators use; the difference is that here we apply it kilometre by kilometre.

Useful features worth knowing

• Best time of day. On the route screen, slide the hour and the whole colour strip updates. The fast way to find the "good window" of a tricky day.
• Reverse. One click flips the route. Useful for linear out-and-back rides where you can choose direction.
• Post-ride mode. If you arrive with a route from a past day, MoguWind Plan pulls the Open-Meteo historical archive and shows the actual wind you had, useful to understand why a day felt so hard or so easy.
• Share. Every route has a permanent URL. If you share it, your buddy sees exactly what you see, with the day and hour you left selected.
• My routes. Your routes are stored locally in your browser. No account, no server with your email. Each route has an ownership token that only you have, with it you can delete; without it, nobody can.

Privacy, no account and no commercial tracking

MoguWind Plan is built so you can plan your rides without leaving a commercial trail. We don't ask for email, phone or password. We don't sell data. There's no advertising. GPX files you create or upload can be anonymised: when saving a route you can turn on an optional privacy trim that hides ~2 km at the start and finish, so your home or workplace can't be inferred from the public route. Routes imported from Strava or Ride with GPS are always trimmed.

For the exact list of what we store and why, see the privacy policy.

Fuelling, what and when to eat on the ride

MoguWind Plan estimates how many carbs and how much water you need based on the route's real conditions and your profile. The idea: you don't have to think about it. You read "take 3 bars, 2 gels, 2 bottles with iso" and the map tells you when to eat each.

The default is an average amateur cyclist (75 kg, FTP 210 W, male, road bike). If your weight, FTP or gender differ, open the "Your profile" block inside the nutrition card and adjust. Values are stored in your browser and apply to every route.

How each variable shifts the plan

1) Duration (Jeukendrup 2014). The 0 / 25 / 45 / 70 g/h ladder by duration tiers is the calculation's backbone. Under 60 min no food needed (glycogen handles it); 60–90 min one bar suffices; 90–150 min steps up to 45 g/h; over 2.5 h, 70 g/h. These are midpoints of the consensus ranges (30–60 and 60–90 g/h).

2) Weight → watts → intensity. Your weight enters the physics twice: in rolling resistance (Crr · m · g · v) and in climbing (m · g · gain / time). Aerodynamics is weight-independent. A 90 kg rider climbing the same pass as a 60 kg rider expends proportionally more watts → higher % FTP → the app raises the carb recommendation.

3) FTP → relative intensity (Romijn 1993). 200 W feels very different at FTP 180 (above threshold, race pace) vs FTP 280 (easy Z2). Romijn showed absolute carb oxidation rises sharply with % VO₂max, from ~30 g/h at 25 % to over 120 g/h at 85 %. That's why we use % FTP, not absolute watts. Intensity factor: 0.7 / 1.0 / 1.3 / 1.5 for Z1-Z2- / Z2+ / Z3-SS / Z4+.

4) Gender → carbs and hydration (Tarnopolsky 2008, Sawka 2007). Women oxidise somewhat more fat and slightly less carbs at the same relative intensity (Tarnopolsky); and sweat on average ~15 % less under matched effort and temperature (Sawka). We apply a 0.92 multiplier on g/h and 0.85 multiplier on ml/h when "female" is selected. "No adjustment" disables both. Effects are small but measurable in the peer-reviewed literature.

5) Hydration → full formula (Sawka 2007). ACSM baseline: 7 ml/kg/h in temperate conditions. We scale by temperature (×1.10 at 20-25 °C, ×1.35 at 25-30 °C, ×1.60 above 30 °C; reflects non-linear sweat rate above 30 °C), gender (×0.85 female) and intensity (×1.20 if %FTP > 70 %, Z3+). For a 75 kg male at 22 °C in Z2: ~580 ml/h. For 90 kg in Z3 at 28 °C: ~1,000 ml/h.

6) Cold rain → +10 g/h thermogenesis bump. If <12 °C and more than 30 % of the route with forecast rain, the body spends extra calories maintaining temperature. We add 10 g/h. Absolute cap at 90 g/h (Jeukendrup), the real intestinal bottleneck, you can't pedal beyond without training your gut (Podlogar & Wallis 2022).

Short rides (<60 min) get no carb adjustment: your glycogen handles it without eating. We also don't lower the recommendation for tailwinds, the baseline is already conservative and there's no point cutting just because nature helps.

Scientific sources

Tap any to see a summary and link to the original paper.

Honest limitations

• The wind forecast is an estimate. The spatial (~5 km) and hourly resolution is great for cycling but not pro-race-level accurate.
• In tricky terrain (deep valleys, coasts with strong local effects) the model can miss local microwinds.
• There's no forecast beyond 7 days, plan with a weekly horizon.
• The average speed you enter is on the flat, it doesn't include wind penalty, so if you put 25 km/h and you'll have constant 30 km/h headwind, you'll arrive later than expected. The app helps you see it, not to replace common sense.