Originally Posted by
framer
Weather dude,
I've often wondered how heavy rain has to be before you get more than 3mm of surface water on a grooved runway as we are not supposed to land while that is the case at my outfit. Do you know what visibility in RA equates to 3mm deep of water on a grooved runway? 1500m? 1000m? 800m?
What about on a non grooved runway?
Framer, with the intensity of rain during the event of at least 40 mm of rain/hour you'll get definitely more than 3 mm on the RWY. We have experience correlating German Highways and their layers of water on them with rain intensity suggesting the layer of water on the runway at LIME would have been thicker by far. If you drive 100 clicks with the car and tried to brake, you would have no traction under those conditions.
What I don't know what the weight of the airplane does and if you guys always get to the concrete and push all the liquid stuff aside...but for sure the water depth exceeded 3 mm by far.
I ask myself why there is no trend info on the METAR - a BECMNG 31025G35KT +TSRA at 1.50 UTC may have helped - and if ATC looked on the radar at all. And since the pics I posted are from the Swiss radar, question if they have that radar imagery at all.