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Posted by Ray
on 5/16/2008, 8:47 am
74.74.189.128
Having apparently successfully deluded several club members into thinking I know something about the weather, I will continue with this exercise.
So, since yesterday, the GFS and NAM have converged rather nicely, allowing for increased confidence in what follows. The Good News: BOTH days are going to be fantastic soaring days! The Bad News: you and your aircraft are going to have to be fully IFR rated, and you'll have to convince flight service you aren't crazy when you file your flight plan. Seriously, without a doubt the wind both days will be pretty much smack on the ridge, AND the 500 mb low, centered to our north, may even prove sufficiently strong to generate a substantive (Gold altitude) wave. There will no doubt be some chances to play legally (VFR) and safely in between the rain-producing "spokes". The timing of those spokes is, as alluded to yesterday, impossible to predict because: (1) They are mesoscale features as opposed to synoptic scale (tens of miles in size as opposed to hundreds, respectively); to "resolve" them, one would need a sufficeintly-dense data-gathering network, along the lines of that used at the Severe Storms Lab in Norman Oklahoma developed by Dr. Fujita to try to predict tornados...something like a sounding station placed every 10 km; (2) the time scale of the features is also too fine; given the above network, the model would have to be re-initiated every 10 minutes or so. I think you all can appreciate how much money doing both tasks might cost. Nevertheless, if the ceiling is high enough (roughly 1500' AGl), one can stay on the ridge in the "clear", that is, below cloud base, even while it's raining (for the same amount of liquid water per unit volume of air, raindrops are far less effective in scattering visible light than fog droplets). Ben there, done that, no sweat if.... You do have to be hyper-vigilant lest the cloud base drops abruptly, a passing shower cuts you off from the airport, or, more excitingly, some deep convection (read: CB) materializes (these is a slight chance of that). For you IFR people, you of course are going to need a Faraday-Cage ship, and unfortunately we've lost our Blanik. We will also need to be hyper-vigilant re ground handling...it will be gusty (close to 30 both days). This is one of those weekends where the pilot's meeting is more that a formality. Situational awareness, bigtime.
So, yours truly is planning to be at the airport bright and early tomorrow morning. I am going to make a concerted effort to slip some amyl nitrate into the coffee cup of the tow pilot, so that he can't remember later what I've asked him to do.
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