Metal aircraft tend to heat up faster after en icing encounter in warmer air..no means to compare though 
Peter wrote:
There is no useful icing forecast for Europe.
Do you know and use Advice by the DWD? I think it is quite good indeed.
Peter wrote:
forecasting simply isn’t that precise.
As it’s weather no it isn’t. And none of it is 100% precise. Weather is nature, not a mathematical model. But that does not mean that we do not have adequate tools.
Anyone could have seen that flying in that area that day was highly problematic. But this guy did not.
tmo wrote:
Isn’t it relatively easy to encounter structural icing with temperatures somewhat above the freezing point as well? I recall being told that high humidity being a factor. The FAA seems to agree – clear ice starts at +2C according to this.
There are many factors involved. I also learnt the figure of +2C as the upper icing limit. It can be more than that even, particularly if a supercooled airplane flies into humid air, but +2 sounds about right for that too. I
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Do you know and use Advice by the DWD?
Well… it basically seems to say “light icing” everywhere the OAT is below zero… so not too different from all the other icing forecasts
I used ADWICE and the Jeppesen icing fcst many times. Together they are quite informative.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Do you know and use Advice by the DWD? I think it is quite good indeed.
My impression of ADWICE is that it grossly overestimates icing probability, but I don’t have data to back this up. To me it almost seems a CYA tool for the DWD to always be able to say that they didn’t fail to forecast some icing. But I would be interested to hear others’ opinions.
I was going to write, as @Peter did, that we don’t even have any indication if icing played a role in this accident. VFR LoC in IMC with no ice would explain it to me just as well. But then I thought I’m not going to take part in the speculation here.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
a supercooled airplane
I think the term “supercooled” is often misunderstood. What it actually means is that liquid water can exist in the atmosphere below its freezing point due to lack of freezing nuclei. As soon as it enters into contact with a plane, it will freeze, because the plane then becomes the freezing nucleus. So the airframe itself cannot be “supercooled”, it may only be “super cool” (like an SR22 
). I think if you have an airframe at +2°C and fly into a cloud with SLD, it may stick. At least that is what I think I remember from my IR weather theory.
My impression of ADWICE is that it grossly overestimates icing probability, but I don’t have data to back this up. To me it almost seems a CYA tool for the DWD to always be able to say that they didn’t fail to forecast some icing. But I would be interested to hear others’ opinions.
Well yes, but on the other hand, there always is ice in clouds between 0 and -10 degrees, so there are not far off. Predicting the intensity is the difficult part.
Have you seen the effect that you fly at +C temperatures and it gets below 0 in IMC?
Of course. Everybody has seen it. And nobody doubts it.
Thank you, bosco, i almost became a little insecure :-)
