Watching the Weather

So its currently Thursday night, the flyout is planned for Saturday morning, around 36h from now. Weather and route briefing at 7.30, wheels up around 8.30AM en route to C77 in Northern Illinois. ‘Wheels up’ is perhaps a little pretentious given I’m in a C152 but it sounds good! On the ride to work this morning the weather folks on the local radio said that weather for the weekend was looking a little dicey. This is not really what you want to hear when you are looking forward to a flight but you never know what’s going to happen until you get there.

As its getting closer to Saturday and the forecasts will start to be closer to reality, I’m looking at ADDS (Aviation Digital Data Service, http://adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov) to see what’s in store. For this type of time frame, 36 hours out, I start on the Prog (Prognostic) Charts and see what’s going on. Here’s an overview of all the current charts:

Even at this resolution you can see there’s a Low pressure over east-central Canada that’s dragging a cold front through the north central states and as the Low moves to the east, that cold front is going to start dropping down into the midwest and potentially messing up our plans. Here’s the current 48 hour forecast:

I’m using the 48h chart rather than the 36h chart because the valid time of the 48h chart is around about my planned departure time of 0830 CDT on Sat June 6th.

Looking at the current chart things dont look clean cut. We’re flying from SE Wisconsin to North Central Illinois and on this map the cold front should have just passed through. The solid green line indicates that SW WI and NW IL will have a 30-50% chance of some precipitation, though the real stuff is on the north western side of IA. The Low in eastern Iowa is on an stationary front (changing to a cold front in Northern IL, indicated by the two yellow lines across the front) and the isobars dont look too close together so its not likely to be very windy. To me (and Im thinking out loud, quite likely to be wrong!) this might suggest we’re going to have some clouds to think about. We’ll be around 4,500′ on the way out (westbound) and probably 3,500′ on the way back (eastbound) so they may be higher than us (hopefully, C152 isnt really my ideal IFR platform and Im not current at the moment)

So, that’s where we are at this stage of the game but everything will change as tomorrow progresses. Things Im going to look for: progress of the Canadian low and its cold front, visibility in northern IL ahead of the cold front. The Milwaukee (KMKE) and Rockford TAFs (KRFD) will start to become relevant tomorrow as their 30h forecasts start to reach our flight times on Saturday morning so I’ll look again tomorrow night and we should have a better idea of what’s going on.

I hope things are decent enough – I picked up a Sony Webbie HD camcorder from BestBuy this afternoon and the plan is to strap this to the top of the passenger seat and videotape the trip – we’ll see how it goes! Grrr – while making the link to the camera on Amazon I found it has an undocumented ‘feature’, a 25min maximum record time, how annoying is that! You have to restart the video every 25mins, it’s not the end of the world but not what you really want. I do like the swivelling head…well, we’ll see, this bad boy may be heading back to the store and I’ll end up with the Flip UltraHD after all…