Glidemet

The rationale
As you can see things are a bit different! The redesign is the result of a train of thought that began with questioning why the “Flight Weather Information” page had only 5-6% of the hits the main site does. There could be any number of reasons - people didn’t know about it despite the prominent link, people found other “links” pages such as Weatherjack’s more useful, or people plain didn’t like it. My original idea was to write a page introducing people to it more explicitly.

Then it struck me - why have a seperate page at all? Why not have all the links here? Moving the sidebar to the left and expanding the width of the page (only 1% of my users are on 800x600) gave much more room to play with. Modern blog design has moved towards filling the 1024px canvas and introducing three columns leaving the main content with line-lengths still comfortable to read, so that’s what I’ve done here. The original sidebar is still on the far left, but next to it are now the weather links that were orignal on the FWI page.

The idea is that this page is now a one-stop-shop for gliding weather - the forecast I write, links to the other forecasters (in the far sidebar), and the best weather info.

The design
At the same time I’ve taken the chance to improve the aesthetics a bit. Really, body text should be black on white so that’s what it now is. I’ve also grown a little tired of seeing Verdana everywhere whereas Arial is just as legible and perhaps a little better looking. “GlideMet” in Trebuchet MS is almost something of a logo so I’ve kept that, but the headers have also moved to Arial. To keep the seperation between content and navigation the blue has stayed behind the two sidebars. Finally I’ve added a nice image to the header, licensed from a photographer on Flickr.

The links
So about those links. They are pretty much the ones I use every day for forecasting. I don’t use all of them all the time and there’s a few more esoteric links I do sometimes use but which are really too specialised to list here. What is presented is really the key resources anyone needs, and rather than list, say, five different Meteosat sites, I’ve picked the best ones.

Obersavtions
How to use these links? Well, the first stage in writing a forecast is to establish what’s going on now. Everyone knows XC Weather - a quite superb site plotting current METARs (plus several private stations) in a very useable way. Below that are my pick of the webcams to have a little look around, and below that is a link to the good old latest Met Office analysis fax chart. However those charts can be up to eight hours old, so beneath that are two links to charts which are automatically plotted from METARs on an hourly basis. I won’t pretend the WMO symbology is very legible but the isobar plots are useful for monitoring the progress of lows or ridges on an hour-by-hour basis. Below the chart links are rainfall - both the original Met Office page and the 15 minute Meteox/Google Maps site - and finally lightning strikes.

Satellite
Next up is the satellite section. The first link is the superb Sat24 site which shows an hour and half or so of the latest High Resolution Visible (HRV) frames - can be quite beautiful to watch. Below that is a link to latest full-resolution polar satellite image. These don’t always cover UK but when they do they offer 1 km/pixel resolution day (visible light) or night (IR). I know the Scottish wave fliers find these particularly useful for spotting wave in the early morning before there’s enough light for the HRV to work - geostationary Meteosat IR has a resolution of less than 4 km/pixel.

Beneath those two hi-res images comes a North Atlantic overview. Although it only updates every six hours, it’s on polar stereographic projection, the same as the Met Office fax charts, allowing easy comparison of approaching weather systems. After that are a pair of Meteosat hourly images via the Met Office - standard visible (~5 km/pixel) and IR at about the same resolution. Both can be looped for 24 hours. Next comes a Eumetsat “product”, i.e. where the satellite data has been post-processed. The “Fog” analysis shows, well, fog (and low cloud) as green and high cloud as red. This only works at night, but that’s when it’s very hard to pick out fog or stratus decks on normal IR. The “airmass” option shows where the air is coming from - blue for polar, ochre for tropical, and often the red streak of the jet stream is visible. The final link is a very useful “synotic analysis”, where KNMI (the Dutch equivalent of the Met Office) forecasters have marked up recent satellite pictures. Can be very useful for seeing how features are expected to move over the next few hours.

Soundings
The next section is simply three southern England soundings - Nottingham, Larkhill and Herstmonceux. Camborne’s not there as that tends to have too strong a marine influence to be useful for boundary layer prediction. The viewer is a Java applet allowing zooming and virtual parcel projection. If you haven’t got Java or want soundings for elsewhere, the next link provides.

Model data
The last section is forecast data. Now you know the current state of the atmosphere, you can see if the models are right in their initial analysis or not (though they almost invariably are), and then go from there.

The RASP viewer is my own customised (with permission) version of the Javascript viewer. The parameters are in rough order of utility - surface heating (no sun on ground = no thermals), the Buckingham sounding (dead in the middle of the country, though other soundings are at the bottom of the list), cumulus cloud base where cumulus is actually going to form, cumulus depth (is it borderline blue?), boundary layer top (the top of thermals, dry or wet, though you can never get there as your glider sinks), overcast cloudbase (fairly tricky to use but can give a good idea of the chance of spreadout), a bunch of varied stuff, convergence (shows sea breeze lines wonderfully), surface wind (too high by about 1.2-1.4x), boundary layer wind (usually spot on), then vertical velocity (i.e. wave) at various levels (only really works at 4 km resolution), then the rest of the soundings.

Below that is the BBC cloud/rain view which is straight out of the excellent Met Office UK mesoscale model which runs at 4 km. This updates every six hours and forms a lovely mottled appearance when cumulus is forecast! That’s followed by a good viewer for Met Office forecast fax charts, links to sites which show GFS etc. data, the ever-useful Meteoblue, GFS forecast soundings using the same Java viewer as the actual soundings above (edit the URL for other locations), and then last but not least the Met Office Aviation briefing charts page (you’ll need to be logged in for the link to work). The F215s are very good, and are the best source of visibility information.

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