However, a pilot doesn’t need to know the details. He/she just needs to know what the weather will be in reality. All the stuff about polar maritime mass etc etc blah blah just pads out the IR/ATPL theory manuals (helping them to reach their current ~1 metre shelf space, and the 80-100k FTO charge) but is no use when flying.
That is where windy.com comes in – you get visualisation. More importantly, it comes from reasonable quality data (ECMWF) – unlike all the websites we’ve had for ~20 years which presented mostly very pretty garbage.
The UK Met Office prob90 has a better model (for this part of the world) but it is secret. The forecasters I used to phone up, on a £1.50/minute premium line, were paying ~5k for access and gave me some fairly bland narrative over the phone – poor value for money.
A lot of stuff simply cannot be usefully forecast, with fog at the top of the list. Plus you get lots of weird conditions where the air is moving all over the place in all directions and again nobody can forecast that.
I miss the times where you had the phone number of a human being who really knows about weather (or even had such a person on the field) and could discuss your plan with them.
I agree! Every austrian airport has a briefing room with a phone to call the local meteorologist for free. I hear rumors it will be scrapped (cost cutting), which I oppose.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
They are also still on some LLSWC’s such as TEMSI/EUROC, which I still think is one of the best charts for all of Europe.
Also the Nordic SWC which covers the Nordic and Baltic countries. (Except Iceland.)
It’s interesting to compare with the French EUROC info for the same area and time (12 UTC on February 2). The fronts are drawn in essentially the same positions, but the cloud forecast is completely different.
Malibuflyer wrote:
pilots were not aware that even though Gafor is yellow there can be clouds to the ground…
I didn’t. (Unless you mean that the forecast can be wrong.) How come? Does the German GAFOR have a reference altitude which is sometimes lower than ground level?
Malibuflyer wrote:
I miss the times where you had the phone number of a human being who really knows about weather (or even had such a person on the field) and could discuss your plan with them.
You still can do that. Most weather services still have numbers to call for a personal briefing. We sure do (+41 900 162 737) and so does the DWD
Malibuflyer wrote:
Same challenge with the (at least in Germany) very popular Gafor: If everything is blue or green it is about fine to go. But as soon as some yellow comes into the game the data is so difficult to interpret that one typically fails – and yes, there have been fatal accidents where it was a likely contributing factor that the pilots were not aware that even though Gafor is yellow there can be clouds to the ground…
GAFOR is the easiest briefing tool available and it really is depressing that even it is too complex for many… and that people often don’t “get” the principle behind it. GAFOR is one of the very few human made tools these days and has a high degree of confidence. The important thing to know is that GAFOR always is related to a certain reference altitude and all the forecasts relate to this altitude. But even for those, most platforms now offer GAFOR in such a way that a mouse over a route or area will give you explanations. Some GAFORS give additional information about what kind of phenomena are expected on the route.
or
Both have the reference altitudes as well as symbols which indicate the main reason for the classification on the sheet. It still is quite important to get the actual PDF because while some flight planners show GAFOR they do not directly display either the heights nor the supplemental information.
What is even more depressing is that some people won’t get the GAFOR information because in the case of Germany or Switzerland it is only available via a paywall, but by now many briefing tools include it and for many countries you need access to the briefing platforms anyhow to file flight plans (homebriefing or skybriefing for instance) where they are included.
Malibuflyer wrote:
It is actually extremely difficult and takes a lot of knowledge to actually interpret what all of this means.
The “Secret” for that is to get yourself a bunch of “favorites”, that is settings where you actually understand what you are seeing and work with those. Also, information does indeed supplement each other at times. e.g. if you take a cross section or Gramet and verify it with a GAFOR, you get a rather good representation of what is going on.
Malibuflyer wrote:
pilots were not aware that even though Gafor is yellow there can be clouds to the ground…
Well, as any forecast GAFOR can be wrong at times, but in fact this should not really happen. GAFOR D means a ceiling of at least 1500 ft above reference altitude and 5 km vis. If there are clouds to the ground on a route or an area considered D then the forecast was wrong. (I just saw that in Germany D means a ceiling of at least 1000 ft AGL, which is a big difference to Switzerland and Austria… that is something which should be addressed. No goood at all..)
For the statistics I do at times, I consider D and O (Switzerland does not use “clear”) as open and M and X closed.
D and below also need cross-verification. I have seen this regarding the area 83 and 84 on the way to Salzburg, which is often M or X due to clouds below 7500 ft (Reference is 6500 ft plus 1000 ft for D) but has visibility of 8 km or more. There verification with webcams, weather stations and METARS quite often shows that ceilings are somewhere around 5000 or 6000 ft which of course is perfectly flyable as long as you don’t want to cross the mountains. Going into SZG for instance, aras 83 and 84 are often misleading to the bad.
So for GAFOR like for every other product the thing is that you need to know the product you are working with. Otherwise, call the meteorologist on duty.
Airborne_Again wrote:
I didn’t. (Unless you mean that the forecast can be wrong.) How come? Does the German GAFOR have a reference altitude which is sometimes lower than ground level?
Mooney_Driver wrote:
GAFOR D means a ceiling of at least 1500 ft above reference altitude
This is exactly the catch here. As a very prominent example: The reference altitude for the “Rhön” area in Gafor is 2.800ft AMSL. The peak of the tower of Wasserkuppe is more than 1000ft above that. And in Germany Gafor D is 1000ft above …
As one can see on page 1 of this publication, there are actually significant parts of some GAFOR areas that are above reference altitude in Germany. Therefore even if the forecast is right it can get extremely tight…
Peter wrote:
However, a pilot doesn’t need to know the details. He/she just needs to know what the weather will be in reality.
That is a contradiction.
When I do aviation teaching in my field (teaching meteorologists about flying for their briefing qualifications) or anyone else about meteorology, the “I don’t need to know that” mantra is one I react to quite abrubtly. Even after 20 years of meteo and almost 40 in aviation I have found that “too much knowledge” is something which does not exist.
There are more useful and less useful things to know. There are things which you learn “to the test” because you think they are irrelevant but sometimes find them to be highly relevant later when you are trying to understand why something is the way it is.
And there is learning and experience. Often a very different thing.
Peter wrote:
All the stuff about polar maritime mass etc etc blah blah
That, I am afraid, is the very basic of meteorology. Who has not understood that will always be doing symptom chasing rather than understanding why things are happening the way they do.
We have been publishing a lovely free brochure (in german, no english version so far unfortunately) for decades trying to give people an easy and understandable introduction to what weather in the Swiss alps mean. You can download it here for the German version.
There is the excellent book by Karl Heinz Hack (Who also is behind the brochure) which goes much further than that. It used to be available in English. I need to ask if there are exemplars left if anyone is interested.
Peter wrote:
More importantly, it comes from reasonable quality data (ECMWF) – unlike all the websites we’ve had for ~20 years which presented mostly very pretty garbage.
Most free websites used GFS. GFS is a very capable and accurate model, but it used to be very low resolution. That had to do with a lot of things: computing power, internet speeds (I recall downloading Grib wind data for flight planning of GFS took 30 minutes) and other stuff. ECMWF has evolved like GFS has, the GFS of today is way different than it used to be. Yes, ECMWF is today one of the best models for Europe, sure, GFS however is not to be discarded, nor is Cosmo, Aladin and others.
The key to any model is to know its strenghts and weaknesses. GFS used to and still does produce quite good upper wind forecasts, which for decades have fed almost all flight planners including FOC and most other “expert systems” and is still used as backup for most of them. ECMWF is a European product which obviously is tailored for European application more than a world wide model like GFS does. Books have been written about individual models which are obsolete when the print dries as all models are work in progress. Change one parameter and the whole model changes.
So the souce of models is important yes and I agree that ECMWF together with ICON are now the top of the pops in Europe. And while it is impossible to get in depth knowledge of what these models are good at and where they lack, experience has to pitch into that. Under-Over estimation of rain, snow, winds, and other things are something most of us try to deal with by comparing models and figuring out where they agree and where they disagree. In Windy you have that possibility with some parameters, compare GFS, EC, ICON and so on and you’ll get some basic understanding of some of the parameters. Eventually.
But every weather planning session has to start at one point, and windy has not to be started up by that point: Get a good analysis chart such as this one and undestand where the lows, highs and front are and where they will be in the next days.
That is the basic situation how polar and maritime air masses operate. Now go on windy and compare these pics with the clouds and other stuff you see on there.
And if you want to know about air masses, play around with this neat little tool.
https://eumetview.eumetsat.int/static-images/MSG/RGB/AIRMASS/
Here you can visualize the actual air mass movements for different places in the world. Not as pretty as in Windy, but very interesting to see the real product once before going to the fancy ones.
Oh yea, and something else. What I find helps a lot is if every day you do a short 10 min weather brief for yourself. Analysis, next 48 hours charts, a bit of situational awareness and possibly read the weather report of your national weather service. You will find that after a short while your understanding of what is going on will broaden massively. Windy and similar things are great tools. But you don’t try to read Shakespeare with basic A1 English or Göthe with A1 German either. Same with weather.
From all the crap for ATO’S to charge more money, I learnt many things, some of which has stuck by me whilst other things I have to look up. Very little of what I learnt in the Met course was IMO crap or useless.
One of the big things to stick in my mind was how one needs to be a lot more vigilant if the wind is coming from your left. How does Windy treat that?
I should add that this is in the Northern hemisphere.
gallois wrote:
One of the big things to stick in my mind was how one needs to be a lot more vigilant if the wind is coming from your left. How does Windy treat that?
How would you expect Windy to treat that?
The reason for that rule is that on northern hemisphere if wind is coming from the left you fly towards low pressure. And things typically get worse when flying towards low pressure. When wind is coming from the right you fly away from low pressure and things often get more pleasant there…
