If it’s part of your scan but flying paragliders with a normal speed of 15 knots for the last 20 years I’ve seen three different wind directions in around 1,000ft Vertical and wind reversal below 100ft whilst landing which hurt.
My last fixed wing pax flight in France was with the owner who had more than 1000 hours on type; I had the local paragliding site wind readings on my phone which he ignored. They pointed to a strengthening cross / tailwind into a small, one way strip with a mountain at the end. He messed the first final turn up due to tail wind and accepted my reluctant suggestion of flying the base leg from the opposite side which went well until he went unnoticed from strong tailwind to no wind, bounced and stuffed the stick forward before I could stop him. During the two subsequent bounces I blocked the stick and whilst I had stopped us breaking off the nosewheel and flipping on our back I hadn’t stopped him bending it and blocking the rudder. The final turn was below 150ft which is common on some of these fields including the local gliding club that I used to tow at where I did one low level go around purely because the drift on my 100ft final turn indicated a strong tail wind opposite to the windsock.
I find listening in flight to the 10 min reports from the wind stations invaluable as well as analysing the local diurnal effects and sea breeze. A couple of weeks ago Nîmes taf was giving 40TCU which wasn’t far from the state of a cloud that I was watching whilst flying but playing it safe I landed. Getting home I checked historical data and found a gust which topped out at 120kph.
