Tim Dawson (1/7/2016)
Rainfall data is not real-time and should absolutely not be used in flight for any tactical purpose. We are thinking very strongly about making it completely unavailable during flight for this reason.Mixed views on this. Initial reaction is to agree - if it's likely to be out of date, it's potentially misleading and a 'false friend' .... then I think about the real-world, and when have I dipped into the met-office app to look at rainfall radar .... e.g. last month I was over the lake district trying to get back to the east coast ... I was visually aware of a line of CBs/rain showers over the Pennines and trying to assess how far south I would be likely to need to go to get clear of them, and whether this would still give me room to route North of Leeds CTA or whether I'd need to route further around the West and South of it (and hence whether I set a course of South, or South Easterly). In that context I'm not making a short term weather avoidance manoeuvre in the way an airliner would use weather radar - but I'm using it to aid a tactical routing decision, and will ultimately be looking out of the window to decide on final flightpath.
However, given the human factors likelihood of someone treating them like a real-time weather radar, and given they mask the terrain shading - probably safest in balance to suppress them in flight.
Tim Dawson (1/7/2016)
There isn't currently anything in the UI to tell when the forecast you're looking at was issued, simply because we're running out of space to display such things. We don't want to turn a supposedly simple feature into information overload. Suggestions welcome!I'm guessing in practice the transition from 'actual' to 'forecast' gives a reasonable indication as to when they were last updated. Do they auto expire if too old? My concern on this is from a planning rather than in-flight perspective, that you may find yourself looking at a 12 hour old forecast assuming it is much more up to date?