GIS (Geographic Information System) applications to soaring?

Is anyone out there applying GIS to soaring?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geograp...rmation_system

I've just started mucking with Quantum GIS (a free GIS tool) and the abundance of free maps and data to produce some custom maps relevant to soaring.

For example, in northern New England we soar over a sea of relatively cool forest with widely spaced hot spots that set off thermals. I've learned how to automatically measure surface temperature from the raw data that floats behind infrared satellite images, and I highlight the hotspots on a map. So now I have an automatically generated map that highlights all of the big patches of asphalt, quarries, rocky outcroppings, etc. in bright red. Using that map I can plan a task that flies between the likely thermal generators. It would be impossibly tedious to wade through this sea of information by visual inspection of a satellite photograph, but it's rather easy and largely automated with a few command lines in the QGIS tool.

There's lots of other GIS data available, but before I go down this rabbit hole, I'm wondering if anyone else is messing around in this area. I would like to compare notes.