Like it or not, winter weather is upon us here in North America. After a few brief weeks of not as much thunderstorm activity, we’re headed squarely into a a couple of months featuring widespread near-freezing temperatures and precipitation. From storing our airplane, to preflighting it, picking a route and ensuring our destination doesn’t have any slippery surprises, winter weather will have an impact on our operations, likely even if we stay in the pattern at a Southern California airport.
Some of us have spent all our summertime weather-watching glued to a Nexrad display (which actually isn’t an altogether bad way to deal with the season’s thunderstorms). The only good thing about summer thunderstorms is it shouldn’t be a surprise where they are and how fast they’re moving. Winter weather isn’t cooperative in those ways, however, and we may have become a bit rusty when it comes to looking for and evaluating weather information since last winter. Let’s try to fix that.
