Michael wrote:

There really are times when you can have areas of yellow and red, in
conditions that look like they favor convective activity, and in fact
right next to convective activity, which are nonetheless stratiform and
quite comfortable to penetrate. The key is knowing that convection is
not there. Now how one is to know that without a good 'spherics device
is beyond me.

While I do see your point (and always have sided with you on your recurring
theme of getting proper utility out of an aircraft), this particular flight
was a return leg of an Angel Flight mission; it was not a mission critical
freight dog flight. I certainly don't see any harm in erring on the side
of caution in wanting to stay clear of level three and higher returns,
especially when there is an advancing cold front in the area.

Whether these particular returns contained destructive turbulence or not
was not something I wanted to test. All of the weather conditions that day
suggested they could be convective and that was enough for me.

Additionally, my point in starting this thread was to question whether it
is really the FSS specialist's job to imply that I am being too
conservative when asking about the colorful radar returns? IMO, absolutely
not.

By the way, I recall one flight a couple of Septembers ago where the red
returns were due to a local radar being set too sensitive for the falling
*wet snow*. In this particular briefing, the FSS specialist was very good.
He didn't imply that I was too concerned about seeing red. Instead, he
investigated my concerns by pulling up the metars from the area, spotted
snow being reported, then concluding that it was a radar sensitivity issue,
not convective activity, that was causing the reds.

--
Peter