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Posted by Ray
on 6/6/2008, 7:42 am
72.230.154.40
OK, from now on, the format is going to be: first, a summary, in just a few sencences or less, which try to address the questions "which of the weekend days (or neither) is better for soaring?" and "what kind of soaring, or just vfr?". That way people get the basic skinny up front. Then I'll provide some insight as to why, some details as to how synopticians think while preparing their forecasts. For those who are so inclined that is...not everyone I have discovered is interested in how the elements of vector analysis apply for example to synoptic scale vertical velocity. So here we go:
(1) Saturday: monster summer-like ridge with surface high centered to our south east guarantees hot, especially Dansville which will probably set records. Ridge working, thermals too, OK for short tasks, not good for Diamond goal attempts. Slight chance of "deep convection". It will take a while in the morning for the south, valley-effect wind to lessen: the power traffic will be using their 14 for a couple hours at least, but eventually we should be able to operate from our 32 after the switch, for the rest of the day.
(2) Sunday: nearly identical to Saturday. Differences not worth mentioning here.
DETAILS: Just a little. Trying to precisely predict when and where a thunderstorm might occur in this scnerio (there is a slight chance both days) is like this: you put a pot of water on the stove and turn the heat on full. You know the water is going to boil eventually, and you can even predict when on the basis of previous experiments. But, exactly where is that first bubble going to form on the bottom of the pot? Or, if the heat is on low, you will never get a rolling boil, but there will still be convective bubbles randomly and occasionally forming. To predict where and when, you would need to monitor the temperature of the bottom of the pot with a sufficiently-dense grid of sensors with sufficient resolution (spaced, say, a few millimeters apart) to resolve and model the evolving convection. Theoretically, this could be done (hundreds of radiosondes covering western NY, model running every few minutes), but it would be prohibitively expensive. We've talked about this before.
Bottom line: the air is going to be hot, so we don't need to add any of our hot tempers to the brew. Let's all fly, have a good time, and a good drink afterwards!
Ray
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