Flyinheavy wrote:
I am following this thread like the first A447 Thread from the very beginning. I am amazed how this speculation of entering a "monster CB" is beeing posted in a nearly constant frequence. Untill now there is no evidence for this.
I have seen other maps showing A447 as already outside the weather at 0214UTC. As far as I have seen no mention to entering a CB has been written in the BEA report.
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I would be careful with using "other maps" - or in fact any maps at all - when you try to pinpoint exactly where the plane was with respect to the weather.
The time resolution of the imagery from the two primary satellites covering this area is 15 minutes for one of them (Meteosat-9), 30 minutes for the other (GOES-E). However, the nominal time for the images needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The reason is that satellite imagers are not snapshot cameras but actually use almost the whole 15 (or 30) minute period to acquire their images. I won't go into the details of all the possible scan patterns here, but the point is that the instrument looks at different regions within the overall image region at different instants during the image acquisition period.
So unless you have intimate knowledge of the file naming convention and the data acquisition pattern of the particular imager, you won't know exactly at what time the pixels you see near the last reported position of AF447 in for instance the 2:00 UTC image were really obtained. The offset between the time given on the "map" and the time of the A/C report could in the worst case be up to 15 (or 30) minutes. In terms of horizontal travel distance I'm guessing this could be anywhere in the vicinity of 100 to 120 NM depending on wind speed and direction - and even half of that could make a big difference with respect to being outside the weather or not.