SkySight Soaring Weather Forecasting

On Thursday, 15 February 2018 16:26:37 UTC+11, Thomas Van de Velde wrote:
SkySight is initiated from the GFS, like most other soaring weather tools.. They interpolate points between the relatively coarse-grained native grid points to provide a sense of precision on Google maps. While this looks very nice, I look forward to ECMWF support on a global scale, and HRRR support in the US.

Hello all,

GFS is not our only source of initialisation data - we integrate directly a number of other sources too. To suggest we simply interpolate is a bit too much of a simplification, we run a model ourselves at a higher resolution using that initialisation data. The sense of precision is 'real' Interpolation would not deliver you the results pilots mention above about the quality of our convergence and wave forecasts.

ECMWF, like GFS, has inadequate resolution (amongst other issues) for direct usage for (most) soaring forecasts. We are considering plotting ECMWF and GFS globally for coverage outside the areas we run our own models anyway.

We are actually experimenting with ECMWF as an initialisation source. If it provides measurable improvement we will utilise it for regions where it does so.
As for HRRR, our model is very similar to HRRR and we typically see negligible differences outside of the aspects we have special tuned for soaring. So we don't see much benefit there.

I believe Naviter is working on some improvements to SeeYou's weather downloads. In the meantime I suggest avoiding setting "Download Everything", as there's a lot of data!

For more details, visit us at the SSA convention in Reno! We will have an announcement regarding our Central US coverage there too.

Cheers,
Matthew
Lead Developer @ SkySight