achimha wrote:
They have it but it’s a thin line. If you make it sound that you want to push weather avoidance responsibility onto them, they will stall.
Come on. Yeah occasionally in the US we do run into controllers who are pricks about helping out. But that is a very rare exception. Thats from personal experience. Im not sure how I could ask for help if I ask, “Any weather avoidance and precip Radar information would be greatly appreciated”.
Aviathor wrote:
Despite the shortcomings of the US radar images laid forth by Sebastian earlier?
I think Sebastian was referring to downloaded weather not info and help form ATC radar.
Until you get a satcomms outage, presumably 
achimha wrote:
I don’t think a stormscope adds much value over ADL. Contrary to radar echos, the sferics downloaded via ADL are without time lag. Lightning triangulation via ground stations works a zillion times better than aircraft stormscopes. If you’re lucky, they give you a halfway correct azimuth but they are unable to show any sort of meaningful distance.
I agree. A stormscope is relatively pointless to me. They never work well enough compared with downloaded strike data.
C210_Flyer wrote:
Getting back to Germans with Wx overlay Im pretty sure I was told when I asked that they did not have that capability a 2yrs back.
They have it but it’s a thin line. If you make it sound that you want to push weather avoidance responsibility onto them, they will stall. However, they do give you advice and can also answer how something looks on their screen. ATC really couldn’t work without weather radar and while Germany is not Florida, it does have widespread thunderstorms in summer and occasional squall lines where ATC have to organize a lot of flights around. That would not work without having a clear picture of the situation. Also putting a sector into flow control mode is often based on the weather because higher spacing is required to allow for deviation vectors.
Boy do I miss ATC helping with weather avoidance.
Despite the shortcomings of the US radar images laid forth by Sebastian earlier?
When Ive asked they said that it was not radar but Sat info about buildups. Not once have I heard any helpful vectors from any controller in any country except my first trip to France and once again they were not talking about radar but Sat info cloud build ups. I will test them again next Sunday 7/23 cause I almost always seem to hit bad weather on one portion of my flight through Austria.
What is semi official?
Hey Im all for it if Im wrong and Im hoping I am.
C210_Flyer wrote:
Boy do I miss ATC helping with weather avoidance.
Which country is this where you miss it? Hungarian FIC (controlling everyone below FL100) for sure gives weather avoidance advice if requested (and in many cases they voluntarily gave me very accurate TS info). They have an official radar feed, but will also use “semi-official” channels when necessary.
achimha wrote:
German ATC are equipped with weather radar overlay and provide assistance like in Florida. Just that the weather is generally less convective.
What about the Austrians? Only thing I ever get is deviate as necessary.
Getting back to Germans with Wx overlay Im pretty sure I was told when I asked that they did not have that capability a 2yrs back.
I am aware of the problems related to stormscopes and have been the victim of them. Fortunately that ended well, but prompted me to get the ADL.
I think the stormscope complements the ADL.
