Navigating Weather

The relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous availability of in-cockpit Nexrad weather radar has helped minimize the risk of using personal airplanes compared to, say, 30 years ago. But risk and aviation seem to be a zero-sum game, since one result of this technology is that were more likely to get up close and personal with cumulus clouds in all stages of thunderstorm development than ever before. Thats not a good thing, but it is real. Along the way, most of us havent taken to heart the technologys inherent limitations for our purposes, like latency.

Joseph E. (Jeb) Burnside

Sunday, April 23, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

In-cockpit Nexrad weather radar, despite its availability, has critical limitations such as data latency and inability to detect developing storms or turbulence, which can lead pilots into hazardous weather.
An accident involving a Beechcraft Baron illustrated these dangers, where the pilot's flight into developing rain showers and updrafts, coupled with reliance on limited weather technologies, resulted in a loss of control and collision with terrain.
The NTSB attributes such accidents to pilots continuing flight into adverse weather while relying on technologies like cockpit Nexrad, which can be 15-20 minutes old and doesn't depict hazards like turbulence.

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The relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous availability of in-cockpit Nexrad weather radar has helped minimize the risk of using personal airplanes compared to, say, 30 years ago. But risk and aviation seem to be a zero-sum game, since one result of this technology is that we’re more likely to get up close and personal with cumulus clouds in all stages of thunderstorm development than ever before. That’s not a good thing, but it is real. Along the way, most of us haven’t taken to heart the technology’s inherent limitations for our purposes, like latency.

No matter which service provides the data or how you display it, in-cockpit Nexrad is not all-seeing or all-powerful. It doesn’t tell us where turbulence is, for example, or lightning, both of which we can encounter in severe VFR miles from a thunderstorm’s cloud structure. Something else Nexrad isn’t able to tell us about is developing storms, those that can create some enthusiastic bumps but are invisible to Nexrad because there’s not enough water in them to reflect back the radar energy.