DrJack --

I took the liberty of truncating your url and came up with this record:

http://www.weather.nps.navy.mil/profiler/r07_sfc.gif

The second bar of 24-hr data "deg" shows a background of Westerly winds
until about 10:00 UTC (1 PM? local), when shifts around the compass are
seen. These shifts persist until around local sundown. Could these
shifts be "convective status" markers from the profiler?

Another story (good grief, will they never stop?):

Wally Scott was limited by car tows to only collecting more Barringer
Trophies than his wife had room for on the walls of their home. He would
wait at the end of the runway with his ship hooked up to his Chevy
station wagon until one or more of the runway windsocks started to droop
and point away from the prevailing wind. This was his signal for "OK,
Boots, slack's out, let's go". And he was gone.

I guess a space-based Doppler Lidar would be hard pressed to to
determine a surface convective reflection through all the intervening
atmospheric layers?

http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/sparcl..._tutorial.html

Thanks for your answer,

Bob Johnson
Midland, Texas







DrJack wrote:

Bob Johnson wrote:
Serusly, maybe Dr. Jack can log in with his forecast of when he thinks
real-time moving map cockpit displays of current thermals, or (let's not
be unreasonable here) 1-hr old thermals will be available.
Or does he think there is a physical limit to this problem, beyond which
we cannot go? (Like 7 A-h batteries)

The first thing that needs to be established is data uplink to a glider
so that _presently_ existing observations (eg satellite images) or
predictions (eg updated BLIPMAPs) can be obtained, and I'm not an expert
on when that will occur. (Milt Hare used to solve the updating problem
by calling his glider-rated wife from the air and having her describe
the latest BLIPMAP predictions to him, but I don't think that will be a
common practice!). Observation of individual thermals is difficult
enough for researchers (typically taking two lidar/radars) so I can't
see that being feasible in my lifetime, and in any case thermals have
relatively short lifetimes - what would be more practical would be
observation of the general "convective status" at specific locations,
which is possible using special temperature-profile sounders (not the
sounders used for upper-level wind speeds) - but at present those are
few and far between (an example of such sounder output can be seen at
http://www.weather.nps.navy.mil/profiler/ord_mix.gif )

--
Dr. John W. (Jack) Glendening Meteorologist