With the luxury of a week off insight, I should like to compare the weather forecasts for various places in Europe. What is a good website?
(apologies if it was already discussed / answered)
week should be enough to research all of the charts here- http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-bin/expertcharts
If done by Saturday, think about flying to this event http://www.natodays.cz/ – not a private party but some interesting elements in the program. Slots can be booked here.
That website looks like what I was looking for, Michal, thanks.
As for the event you mentioned: military things are not my cup of tea AND the airport requires a transponder, quod non.
I might well consider flying into CZ, though.
For a quick and dirty look 5 days ahead, you can’t beat the MSLP chart e.g.
One of the things this doesn’t tell you are any low cloudbases to be found in high pressure areas in the winter, and these impact VFR flight. But there is no useful cloud forecast for low cloud anyway, beyond the tafs.
Arrgh, that confirms my worst fear. Indeed of all the many factors that can and often do thwart my good flying intentions, low cloud is the worst.
meteox.com provides few interesting insights via different links.
Always the optimist, my impression is that humankind is getting better at forecasting the weather. Well, we should, with ever more crunching power of computers and insight in how our atmosphere works. So I did a little experiment looking at the forecast for today, starting 7 days ago, looking at the ECMWF model. Not anywhere near solid proof as just being just one serial observation, but interesting nonetheless. Maybe (many) more of us should do the same at many different points in time to see if my optimism is justified. All in all, reasonably accurate I’d say for strategic planning. The only odd one out is actually from a recent as yesterday. I recall seeing that before, where suddenly the forecast changed but then got ‘back in line’ again a day or two after. BTW, the group that looked at going to Zaragoza last week, which got cancelled, also ended up seeing pretty good forecasts, in particular a serious front over Italy seen a week in advance.
The daily forecasts, starting at today minus 7 days. OK, I missed 2 days. One was was a monday so that’s a good excuse. Saturday I took my lady out, so that also counts as a great excuse.
Opinions?
And here’s reality
Interesting, Aart.
One idea if you wanna do something like this is to take a day at 12 UTC and then take a shot of the predictions for that day from 1 week prior to the event and then add the actual analysis. That would give you a pretty good idea how good every model is in certain situations.
Opinions?
I’d say pretty accurate. In certain situations when weather is conditioned with wider area phenomena, the forecasts are more accurate but when it’s dependent more on local conditions, the forecasts tend to change radically from day to day. I guess that’s why they are more accurate in autumn and winter than in summer and spring.
