I actually like and use the GRAMET. Of course you can’t rely on precise depiction of cloud layers particularly close to the ground as that is a limitation of the GFS model used by it.
I am less stuck to the concept of official weather as sources like GRAMET and windyty use the same weather models as national weather providers.
They just can provide much better visualisation tools.
A true VFR flight by a VFR only pilot looks unlwise given that picture.
@what_next : I have a Flugwetter.de subscription and use it both on PC and via the Android App regularly. The subscription wasn’t cheap but DWD seems to do a rather good job at weather prediction, at least during my yet short flying career.
MedEwok wrote:
The subscription wasn’t cheap but DWD seems to do a rather good job at weather prediction, at least during my yet short flying career.
DWD don’t really do weather prediction at least in the broader regional context. They use the same computer models as everyone else.
I would not fly. Agree that for VFR METARs are good. I would use AeroPlus and check if all dots are green. There’s also a time select option in AeroPlus that analyses TAFs and displays a map with dots as it would for METARs. One can select +3, 6 or 12 hours.
I use Gramet before every flight. The problem I have with it is that one may check a route at a given time and it looks just fine. Then there may be a front just 100km outside of the picture, and if it is moving faster than GFS predicts, it will meet you overhead destination. It happened to me twice already.
I would not do any flight solely based on a GRAMET.
GRAMETs are however a wonderful supplemental source of information which most of the times gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of clouds at altitude. You do however need to compare them to the MSLPs, wind charts and TAFs. You can also cross-check against weather ballon observations.
If I were reasonably confident I would be able to stay outside icing on departure from EPKK climbing to FL100, and the low-level cloud cover was reasonable so that returning was an option, and I had an airplane able to climb quite a bit higher without being asthmatic, and I had oxygen, I would depart IFR from EPKK because the 0-isotherm also looks like it is about 3000’. Concerning the build-ups approaching Skopje, if I had other weather sources indicating that TCUs would be far between so I could navigate visually between them, or I had an on-board weather imagery solution like an ADL or weather radar, I would not worry too much about them.
And it is not because the GRAMET shows blue skies that there won’t be a layer of stratus or strato-cumulus. Blue skies on a GRAMET cans be seen as benign IFR weather 
@MedEwok: DWD offers a subscription scheme for flying clubs which can reduce the price quite a bit. My club has such a set-up in place and I pay only half of what an individual subscription would cost.
The way it works is simple: The club purchases a number of subscriptions. The actual price depends on the number taken, the more the cheaper. DWD sends a single invoice to the club which in turn then distributes the cost/bills the individual members who have taken up such a subscription.
There is no difference to the individual subscriber, one still has an individual password, access to everything etc. other than the annual invoice coming from the club and not DWD.
For the club, there is a bit of additional admin work but, depending on the set-up, this is hardly worth mentioning. Once a year, the club needs to send a note to DWD confirming that the individual subscribers are still club members. And the club needs to bill the individual subscribers. As my club has an electronic billing system, this is just setting a tick in the box “DWD-subscriber”, the invoice is generated by the system, sent directly to me via e-mail and my bank account will be charged via direct debit. Very straightforward.
Maybe worth checking with your club whether a club subscription with DWD might be of interest.
MedEwok wrote:
@what_next : I have a Flugwetter.de subscription and use it both on PC and via the Android App regularly. The subscription wasn’t cheap but DWD seems to do a rather good job at weather prediction, at least during my yet short flying career.
I pay around €50 through my club for my DWD subscription, use it both for planning of flights – the info they provide is really helpful to reasonably determine a yes / no for a VFR flight 3 – 5 days in advance – and for checks after a stop. What makes it worthwhile is that it gives me details across Europe, when flying in UK I can usually get a better overview using this subscription than with the Met Office GA Briefings, paid or otherwise…
Oh, a final point – to claim this ’wasn’t cheap’ is a delicious overstatement, especially in the world of aviation where cheap usually means the bill is in multiple hundreds of euros, not thousands ;-)
Steve6443 wrote:
I pay around €50 through my club for my DWD subscription
I believe I pay around 80 € per year for a DWD subscription that I use solely with ADLConnect. For all other weather information I use the Autorouter. For satelite weather I use DWD indirectly through ADLConnect or the autorouter bot, or the Meteo France aviation weather site.
JasonC wrote:
DWD don’t really do weather prediction at least in the broader regional context. They use the same computer models as everyone else.
The models are based on similar PDEs, but the DWD has an own computing center and runs own models (ICON, COSMO-DE ensembles, etc) on their 1,1 Petaflop Cray system.
They do a lot research on that topic, too. Their pro_met magazine is very interesting if you like to lean more about meteorology than outlined in the usual aviation meteorology textbook: http://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/pbfb_verlag_promet/archiv/archiv_promet.html
@Steve6443 wrote:
Oh, a final point – to claim this ’wasn’t cheap’ is a delicious overstatement, especially in the world of aviation where cheap usually means the bill is in multiple hundreds of euros, not thousands ;-)
Well given the fact that DWD is a 100% tax financed German federal agency I don’t even know why I as a tax payer have to pay them anything at all, really…
And I guess I am still much too new to aviation to accept that something is “cheap” if it costs hundreds of euros. I still have not quite figured out why I pay the same price for flying a plane for one hour as I do for filling the tank of my VW Golf VI three times. The Golf also carries about five times as much payload (with ease), can go as fast as the aircraft’s cruise speed (180 km/h or 100 kts) on an unrestricted Autobahn and takes me 2000 km far away for the same price as 180 km in an aircraft. And all that despite the aircraft using more or less the same (actually an inferior variant) of internal combustion engine as the Golf. Strange hobby I chose, I sometimes wonder about myself
