Nowcasting Your Flight

My goal in this column is to bring the art and science of forecasting to pilots. This is because forecasts arent perfect and still wont be in the foreseeable future. This is not an indictment of the profession, but an acknowledgement of the realities of the forecast problem. For example, a single balloon launch is used to represent the 400,000 cubic miles of troposphere over Arkansas, and only happens every 12 hours. This is why good forecasters are skeptical of models and blend them with experience, intuition, and their own analysis before making a forecast.

Tim Vasquez

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Weather forecasts are inherently imperfect, especially at smaller scales (meso- and microscale), necessitating that pilots actively practice "nowcasting" by blending official forecasts with real-time observations and personal situational awareness.
Effective nowcasting requires understanding the atmosphere's different scales and being able to recognize when actual conditions (e.g., unexpected cloud layers, wind shifts) diverge from the forecast, using these discrepancies as a signal for increased caution.
Pilots should apply meteorological basics to nowcast specific phenomena such as clouds, fog (recognizing key ingredients), thunderstorms (maintaining separation, understanding radar limits), and turbulence (identifying instability, utilizing pilot reports).

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My goal in this column is to bring the art and science of forecasting to pilots. This is because forecasts aren’t perfect and still won’t be in the foreseeable future. This is not an indictment of the profession, but an acknowledgement of the realities of the forecast problem. For example, a single balloon launch is used to represent the 400,000 cubic miles of troposphere over Arkansas, and only happens every 12 hours. This is why good forecasters are skeptical of models and blend them with experience, intuition, and their own analysis before making a forecast.