Originally Posted by
VORTIME
Why does everyone want to talk about VFR/IFR when the question relates to determining cloud tops ... ?
VT
Because VFR/IFR is a great subject for debate and opinion. How to find cloud tops needs concrete recommendations, knowledge, and URLs.
I use -
http://pages.unibas.ch/geo/mcr/3d/meteo/ which gives a reasonable view of cloud tops over a location for a 3 day period.
http://131.54.120.150/ which in the flight hazards area gives an icing and turbulance 'forecast' which gives an indication of tops.
http://www.wunderground.com/modelmap....asp?model=GFS graphs a set of parameters over Europe which can give an indication of weather at 850, 700, 500 mb
As well the usual products from Avbrief and the local metoffice provide usefull information.
It would be realy nice though if someone had the University of Basel time phase of cloud tops done as a geographic/time phase (from departure at Departure time to Dest at ETA) colour coded to show temperature levels.
Finally there are forecast skew-Ts available from GFS directly, from
http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ready/cmet.html and somewhere on the site you can download what I understand to be the whole model run updated every 12 or 24 hours (about 70mB)