Are not all these bits of kit useful for strategic planning? ie to give convective activity a wide berth. I realise area thunderstorms can pop up, but in Europe SigWx is pretty good at showing where to expect this.
If you can’t climb above to avoid embedded TS, then onboard weather radar might be useful.
However, reading weather radar is a bit of an art, possibly best done multi crew. Getting tilt angle too high when top of climb can also lead to missed cells, and lightning strikes from below when clear of cloud.
Here turbofans with their ability to go FL350 and above have an advantage.
Does the ADL deliver the Blitzortung sferics data and if so how often?
In fact the European strike data delivered by the ADL system comes from a company called nowcast. They operate a commercial lightning detection network similar to Blitzortung. Blitzortung is nice but they have no interest supporting commercial products.
Currently the data is updated every 15 minutes. It could be done more often but this way is is synchronized with the radar which works out best in real life. In my personal opinion the strike data should be cumulated for a few minutes else clusters are not clearly visible. In addition most convective weather will show up on the radar much earlier than the strikes will start to pop up.
What is the deal with the 15 minute delay? Is that a function of how often the radar data is recorded, or is it just an artificial (licensing) limitation?
That is a complex question. Usually it is usually the actual data acquisition which takes so long. Most 15min radar products are made from a volume scan. The antenna is turned many times at different vertical angles. Then from this volume model the radar image is generated. If there are 5min radar products those are often only made from a single turn of the antenna. This is faster but the quality of the result is not so good.
Are there any sources of less delayed radar data for Europe?
There is a source of radar which is updated every 5min for central Europe (about a triangle France, Switzerland, Germany) but for technical reasons it comes with massive delay of about 12min so in real life there is no advantage over the 15min picture which comes with about 3min delay and is higher quality.
I think this is a somewhat academic discussion. If you are in the clag in bad enough weather that you are exposed to a cell forming in front of you during the 15 minute update then you are doing something wrong. Europe has fairly benign convective weather compared to the US without the energy levels there and is far more stable.
ADL120 is excellent for strategic planning and situation where you are arriving, TEMPO is forecast over the next few hours and you want to see what is happening now. TEMPOs are very approximate by their nature and a real time (or as good as) picture is priceless. I use it all the time.
If you are in poor weather and trying to avoid the most intense precip then on board radar is impossible to beat.
Without it you get a lot of what we see on this board with fly-ins – people cancelling based on TAFs that are a considered guess.
It is good in flight also to be able to get realtime METARS when out of range of the ATIS and be able to consider alternative plans during the enroute phase.
I personally find lightning the least important piece of data when flying.
The lag in weather radar under ADL120 is no different from delays in NEXRAD really.
Peter wrote:
if you purchase and agree to site a detector in your garden, you get free access to the data in digital (lat/long) format
Everyone can get that data stream, without siting a detector.
Do you think they push out new animated GIF’s to all the website users every time there is a strike? That would be way too costly in terms of traffic on their servers. Instead, the javascript webpage client connects to a websocket, declares its rectangle of interest (west east north south), then gets fed strike data in JSON format whenever there’s a strike within that rectangle of interest. It took me about 5 minutes to implement a proof of concept client in python.
It’s about 2k characters per strike, and the server supports deflate compression, so it’s already almost satlink friendly. The majority of the data per strike is the information about which receivers recorded the strike – so it could easily be made more compact (by a proxy that strips that data).
Latency is now about 2 seconds, from the GPS timestamp of the strike recording to reaching my computer (for Australia, there are no strikes in Europe at the moment).
So we now have:
So choose your poison, I guess.
Edit: Example strike data from blitzortungs websocket server removed, as the sites markdown processing wreaks havoc on it…
Your stormscope gives you realtime strike data….why rely on telemetered data for that?
I flew in the Southeast US since 1980 and have had a Stormscope the entire time. I would not want to fly without one. When XM weather was offered with 5 minute Nexrad updates, I was an early adopter, first with portable devices such as the GPSMAP 396, then 496, then 696 and install of a GDL69A. 2 years ago I added the GDL88 that provides NEXRAD data thru the ADS-B link. My current aircraft has 1 GPSMAP 696, 1 Stratus 2 receiver, an iPad with ForeFlight and iPhone 6+ for backup, a GDL69A, a GDL88, a Flight Stream 210, and my trusty WX1000+ Stormscope. I don’t use the equipment to penetrate solid lines of thunderstorms, but to navigate around them. I use the Stormscope to determine if the Nexrad is convective or not.and will penetrate yellow areas if they are not convective. With my stormscope as my guide, I have never experienced greater than moderate turbulence. Most of my flying is at altitudes between 5000 and 11000.
I don’t find the accuracy of the distance to be an issue with the Stormscope, in fact it is conservative. With a little experience, one even learns how to take advantage of interpreting the radial spread to determine both distance and intensity of the storms. Don’t fly towards the dots! With Nexrad, keep a wide berth of at least 20 NM from the edge of any convective activity, always have an out. In the 35 years of SE US flying, I have only had to turn around and land two times. In both cases, I waited out the activity on the ground, and continued in beautiful VFR weather to the destination a few hours later. All other situations, I have been able to circumnavigate the bad weather.
AnthonyQ wrote:
Your stormscope gives you realtime strike data….why rely on telemetered data for that?
To repeat: yes it gives you realtime strike data, whose range is complete fiction, it’s mass you carry around even if not needed, it’s expensive and has limited coverage (200nmi).
Datalink strikes provide you with unlimited range, accurate locations, and cheap, low weight airborne equipment.
tomjnx wrote:
To repeat: yes it gives you realtime strike data, whose range is complete fiction, it’s mass you carry around even if not needed, it’s expensive and has limited coverage (200nmi).
For an experienced user, this is absolutely not a limitation. I would give up my GPS and Nexrad before my Stormscope. I might not know where I was, but I would be in a safe place.
tomjnx wrote:
To repeat: yes it gives you realtime strike data, whose range is complete fiction, it’s mass you carry around even if not needed, it’s expensive and has limited coverage (200nmi).Datalink strikes provide you with unlimited range, accurate locations, and cheap, low weight airborne equipment.
I’m not sure what you fly Tom but 200nm is well over an hour away for most light aircraft…and the reality will bear no resemblance to any picture by the time you get there ..the important range is more like 30-50nm and depending on which model of scope you have I would say most units are accurate enough at that range for avoidance….
@NCYankee, @AnthonyQ it’s interesting that both of you objected about the 200nmi range being an issue, but none of you objected my main arguments, namely that the stormscope strike range is complete fiction, the stormscope is additional weight and expensive. Kind of validates my reservation about the “technology”.
But as I said, pick your poison. I won’t invest into this piece of old tech…
