Weather forecasting

[topcat450]

What does everyone else check (weather wise) prior to flights?

I use the 214/215 forms for flights the same day, as well as the mk1 eyeball and the BBC weather forecast.

For planning more than 12 hours in advance I tend to just go off what the BBC say and then await how it looks the morning of a flight.

What do others use for flights the same day, and flights 1 or 2 days away?
:confused:

[Cabotage Kid]

Met Office 3 day forcast to plan ahead

TAFs, METARs and 214/215 forms when planning.

Apart from obvious freezing levels, CBs, minima/wind issues my basic questions are:

Is the weather worsening or improving and at what rate?
Are there any fronts. If so what direction, what speed, what type?
Carbice?

[Whirlybird]

This site http://ows.public.sembach.af.mil/wxcharts/wxcharts.htm
gives the synoptic charts for 5 days in advance, and tends to be pretty accurate. I'll sometimes use the met office 3-day forecast too, and the BBC.

On the day I use forms 214/215 and TAFs.

[LondonJ]

A friend mentioned www.avbrief.co.uk/ to me, I was looking through it and they provide a huge amount, including international TAFS and METARS for a set route for only about £30/yr.

[windymiller7]

Try these two web sites as well

http://www.xcweather.co.uk/



http://www.wellesbourneairfield.com/weatherflash.htm

The wellsbourne site is superb

[drauk]

http://fly.dsc.net will give you global TAFs and METARs for the nearest reporting stations to any place (useful if you want to know the weather at somewhere other than a reporting station but don't know where the closest one is). If you store a route it will give you the weather en-route with one click.

[IO540]

I use Avbrief (TAFs, METARs, F215, synoptic charts) and for same-day flying it is usually all one needs.

This one

http://www.arl.noaa.gov/ready/cmet.html

is my favourite for all weather beyond the "official data" carried by Avbrief and others, and allows a longer range view.

The Sembach site looks great but the low level cloud images are, I have usually found, too inaccurate to be relied on for being VFR. They regularly forecast no cloud at all below 7500ft when in reality there is a solid overcast at say 4000ft. This may be OK for the UK but is no good for e.g. France where one has to pick specific levels to avoid the military airspace that covers most of France.

BEWARE because some of the countless "amateur weather" websites carry old data which, presumably, they lift off other sites. On TAFs, the preparation date/time is in the TAF but this isn't the case for synoptic charts and you have no idea how old the chart is. It could be last year's. I have even had some WAP website deliver TAFs that were 3 days old; stopped using that one immediately.

This "lifting" of weather data is why the NOAA site above now has a device which prevents scripted downloading of the data.

I would very much like a website which can take GFS data and do a plot of icing and cloud tops en-route for a specified route. That is what I find is really missing from available info. OTOH it isn't possible to forecast accurately.

One can get an idea of icing levels from Form 214/215 but like all the "official" data that's same day only. The NOAA site has a way of getting the temperature profile but doing this for a long route is very laborious.

[J.A.F.O.]

euro.wx.propilots.net/ (http://euro.wx.propilots.net/)

Has some good stuff, though I tend to use the met office.

[RichyRich]

Whirlybird's link is good, but too slow for my lousy dial up at home, and doesn't make it through the firewall at work, so my list is:

Of course the Met Office, both the aviation pages and this one:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/charts/index.html

And I look at this site using the "Mittl. Wolken" predictions (with cloud for you and I):
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsavneur.html

I'll see if IO540's link is useful in the long term, thanks for that.

Cheers
Rich

[mark147]

My favourite site for charts a few days in advance is:

http://expert.weatheronline.co.uk/

In particular, the model overlay chart is excellent at working out whether any forecast for a particular day is likely to be of any use: if all the models have very different views of what's happening, you know you'll just have to wait and see.

The site has a huge range of charts derived from the GFS model, though there's not all that much to help you with cloud cover.

Mark