Announcing UAVForecast.com

Francis German April 6, 2015 at 12:41pm

Hi,

great tool!

Where does your data come from?

Could you implement a possibility to see weather of already passed days?

Thanks a lot!!

lloydm March 24, 2015 at 11:44am

I'll check those pages out, thanks guys. One of the challenges is that the aviation forecasts including cloudbase are usually only available for ICAO airports. For example, I live about 6 miles away from KLGA, and I would often look at the KLGA METAR to check up on the weather. What I learned was that the conditions there are quite different from the conditions at my location, particularly wind speed and temperature. Some users also won't have a major airport nearby. If I could find a reliable API for visibility and cloud base forecasts that works for any location globally, irrespective of proximity to an airport, I would use it...

David McCallister March 24, 2015 at 7:59am

This is simple and effective. Thanks for the good work!

Here is another resource that might inspire you for content. Previously this has been my go-to when checking weather before I fly:

http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/launch/code.cgi

Aviation Weather, Wind Speed, Direction, Temperatures, Forecast

Aviation Weather, Wind Speed, Temperatures, Forecast

Anthony Farnsworth March 23, 2015 at 6:07pm

Weather underground provides the aviated weather info including the could elevations and items to determine some of these factors http://www.wunderground.com/Aviation/. Visibility in combination with rain/fog info will get a potion of the way there. I have seen a great portion of these types of tool to help decide if it's safe to fly but never all together as you have mostly built. great Job! If you add the aviation weather you have the making for a fantastic plugin for any commercial tool. I might suggest checking out airware. I think they hope to provide the ability for 3rd party plugins on there ground station and yours would be great!

lloydm March 23, 2015 at 5:01pm

I am able to add visibility, but the weather forecast API I'm using doesn't provide current or forecast cloud base.

Anthony Farnsworth March 23, 2015 at 5:00pm

Have yoi considered added visibility and the cloud altitude? With the faa requiring typical vfr conditions for commercial uavs it would be great for this to be calculated as well.

lloydm March 23, 2015 at 3:22pm

Sorry for the outage, the Wing Kp model has some invalid date/times right now, made the code robust to that. Sky cover is cloud cover.