Systems which transmit power such lidars need to throw out large amounts
of energy to get even tiny detectable returns. Not good for battery based
power supplies. Batteries are not really that power dense and I'm no where

near as confident that we will see the really big step forward that most
tech
pundits are predicting.

Thermal imaging needs a fair bit of power to get a reasonable temperature
difference to the warm air your trying to detect. Again this is too power
hunger for batteries.

Even if you could realise these they both suffer from the basic flaw, in
that
they tell what's happening 10k down track while you're 10+minutes away
from actually getting to it. By the time you arrive it' frequently
changed.

My vision of the next step in remote thermal detection follows a different
tac.
Computer CPU processing will certainly continue its quite staggering
increase
in capacity. So I reckon we could see a super high fidelity RASP. This
would
be constant refining its numerical predictions based on real time
observations
from both you flight and others via flarm. It would also use historical
"big
data" previously collected from hundreds if not thousands of flights in the

same area to further tune the predictions with likely thermal nucleation
locations. Now we would have a systems which is actively modelling the
atmosphere in a strip say 50k down track and 10 k wide, in real time. The
really intriguing aspect of this is that it's producing predictions both in
terms
of what thermals will be further down the intended track and what strength

they will be when you actually arrive.

An imagination can be a scary thing.

Fraser