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Old 17th February 2007 | 10:41
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SNS3Guppy
 
Joined: Oct 2005
Posts: 3,218
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From: USA
I don't know...right at the moment my primary assignment is to fly into weather, and we get several skew-t charts as part of the briefing every morning. I find the information completely useless.

It's relevant for the met scientists who are gathering data on our flights and who are administering the program, but from a pilot perspective (excepting glider flights where a skew-t and lifted k index has some relevance)...it's meaningless to me. It doesn't affect what I do or how I do it.

Basically what you have there is a radiosonde graphic representation showing temperature and dewpoint from the surface to whatever altitude the sonde quit providing data, or went out of range. It does provide wind data at altitude, which is useful, but doen't give the location; the balloon and radiosonde are drifting and it's not point data. It's the same data, however, that's refined into your winds aloft reports.

The forecast models are surprisingly accurate, often nearly identical, to the actual data obtained by sonde or by aircraft (we do both; skew-t plots are obtained from each of my flights, and compared to the balloon data), to the point where we occasionaly substitute the model data (data obtained from the computer using a global weather model...the same thing that provides all the weather predictions you use on a daily basis) for the real thing when something is missing or a balloon can't be sent up.

What the skew-t can do for you is reasonably predict cloud bases and clouds at altitude, as well as the liklihood for icing, and the potential for convective activity. You can also predict the minimum surface temperature necessary for convection, and the height to which the convection may be expected to rise, and may even calculate the values of rising and falling air based on the chart data, in and out of convective activity. This is good and well for the scientist, but of little application to us as airplane drivers. I am interested in METARs and TAF's, winds aloft data, area forecasts and other data pertinent to my flight, but it's entirely possible to overthink the planning with things such as the skew-T.
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