Here’s your chance to say what you would like to see in competition weather briefings, and also what you want on those bits of paper everybody leaves on the floor afterwards.
First, the briefing itself.
You can chose up to five options, but try to chose fewer if you can—-briefings shouldn’t last forever! On the other hand, I need to cater for everyone—-not just those who have sat24.com on their smartphones.
I’ll be doing cross-sections for sure this year, but there’s more than one way of doing them. They can be for just the airfield, or one can make an attempt to “follow” the route, taking into account when and where the gaggles should be going, and what they’ll find there. My housemate found a wonderful old soaring weather book from the 1970s in our library with a section on competition forecasting, which had things like top-down charts of the task with weather symbols and cloud bases etc. pencilled in along the legs, which I rather liked. There were more ideas in there but I can’t remember them now! Will get the book out when I’m back…
RASP charts would be my favourite fields—-surface sun and cumulus base, plus probably climb strength. But show those charts for two times, and that’s six charts of detailed information to display. Can people really take all, or even any, of that in? How much would they remember if I asked them again in ten minutes?
Forecast charts would be blow-ups of maps of temperture or wind from sites such as Wetterzentrale—-again, same issues of data-overload.
Personally I’d like to see simpler briefings, with perhaps a synoptic, a sounding, latest sat pics, and then a chat around the cross-section. But tell me what you think.
[poll id=”5”]
What should be in the hand-outs? Obviously there’s a limit to what organisers can afford to print, so we’re probably limited to a double-sided sheet of A4 here, and the vote limit is 4 options. Bear in mind that if you want more than two items on the hand-out, they’re going to be A5-sized images.
[poll id=”6”]
Here’s a separate poll about what comp forecasters should be talking about—-what happened (and why) for yesterday? An outlook for the rest of the competition? Or just the day? You can vote for everything here if you want, but again, think about if you really want all of that.
[poll id=”7”]
Finally, there’s probably things that you’d like to see but I’ve not thought of and made an option, so let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d like added as a poll option.
).
. I’ll have a look around for anything better…
