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Operating altitude / service ceiling

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

That's a great site, Emir.

Very important since meteox.com doesn't cover that area.

I wonder if there is another URL which presents just the image, without the stuff around it?

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Just an idea.. What if we start doing some actual notes on cloud tops (time, position, altitude) especially when breaking out on top, and then after arrival correlate this data to sat imagery (SAT24 comes to mind). Maybe we can come up with some sort of a grey scale that gives us a better indication of where we can expect to be VFR on top. I know that on sat images you cannot see possible VFR conditions in between cloud layers, but such a layer would be a bonus.

In particular data around FL100-120 would be interesting for people that want to fly on top but don't want to bother with oxygen.

Shall we give it a try and send data to Peter for him to try to determine some consistency?

I am heading into Europe this weekend from Spain, and will get some data.

Private field, Mallorca, Spain

I wonder if there is another URL which presents just the image, without the stuff around it?

I'm not aware of it.

LDZA LDVA, Croatia

Any opinions/experience with this site?

http://www.ogimet.com/guia_gramet.phtml.en

Private field, Mallorca, Spain

That site, Aart, is unbelievable.

I know Ogimet but this must be a recent addition.

Basically they are plotting GFS data but it's very nicely done.

The basic site is here. One can enter just one ICAO code, for a "spot" report, or two or more for a "route" report e.g. EGKA LFMD LDSP separated by underscores.

This is amazing. Meteoblue would do a "route" but it used dodgy java code which crashed a lot, and this is much better.

Unbelievable how well it is done. They show the selected flight level as a yellow line and, just for perfection, they adjust it for the actual pressure... you also get data along the route, for the selected level.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I was also blown away by the presentation. This is really all you need. Now, how good are GFS data. Is that the best there is? I am almost tempting to schedule my next trip into Europe on a day where I can experience icing, different cloud systems and all, just to see how accurate this all is :) I live in Spain and it is nice to see that a good product is made here. Maybe we should provide the author with compliments and suggestions, if any. i can also help a bit on the English ;) I will try to get in touch.

Private field, Mallorca, Spain

Indeed, the Ogimet presentation is very well done. Very useful although I don't know how good his criteria are. Others like DWD (German National Weather Office) have a similar interface but everything is designed based on the CYA (cover your a**) principle -- most negative interpretation possible. If something happens, the weather office has warned you.

Surely, there is no possible liability for a weather forecast.

A pilot is trained to deal with whatever happens - if VFR you turn back (etc) and if IFR you do various other things.

The Ogimet site is more or less just plotting the GFS weather model which is available in textual data form, from the USA.

The only thing which involves humans are TAFs & METARs and MSLP charts. TAFs do tend to be pessimistic; usually taken care of by PROB30 TEMPO +TSRA I don't know how the MSLP charts are produced now; I think the fronts are drawn in by hand from (mainly) satellite imagery.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter,

Oh yes there is. It has not happened recently, primarily because of what Achim sais. But if met offices screw up, then help them who ever but I would not want to be the one who did.

GFS is a world wide model, it works fairly well for inflight winds (almost all flight planning programs use it because it´s also free). However, it is of course not very dense in terms of grid density. Here, the local models of say, the met office or DWD or meteo Swiss are more developed for the actual areas they cover. Also EZMW is a European model which is made by European agencies and will take into account more stuff than GFS does.

That does not mean that GFS or GME are bad models, far from it. Those of you who use apps like Weather Pro, which is based on GFS data, or who use flight planners know this. Primarily, one needs to know where models are good and where not. They all have their strong and weak points. We do have one model in use which constantly overstates rainfall, if you know that, that is fine and you can work around that because if you have them change rainfall, other more important bits might screw up. Models are erally the closest thing to Rocket Science in Meteorology and they are in more than one way masterpieces of scientific engineering.

The only way to figure out how good a site or a model is to work with it, to compare it and to learn where it is stong and where it is not. The site quoted here looks phantastic, pretty close to some stuff the DWD does. I´ll have to look at it carefully.

Best regards Urs GCLP

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland
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