Hi there,



I have just (for demonstration purposes) plotted a flight for 1000Z on 4th September 2011 from Redhill to Gatwick. The Gatwick TAF is admittedly quite complex and reads:



EGKK 031654Z 0318/0424 22007KT 9999 FEW030

BECMG 0401/0404 8000 BKN010

TEMPO 0404/0412 4000 BR -RA SCT003 BKN006

PROB40 TEMPO 0404/0411 SCT002 BKN004

TEMPO 0410/0413 RA

BECMG 0413/0415 9999 SCT030

PROB30 TEMPO 0420/0422 8000 -SHRA



At the programmed time of flight, the forecast is likely to be poor VMC (8000M vis, broken 1000') verging on IMC (4000M vis, scattered 300', broken 600', light rain) and possibly a little worse. This is correctly decoded in the textual TAF decode pane, however the virtual radar pane seems only to show the "9999 FEW030" part of the TAF with just a few puffy mid-level clouds - see below:







Is it possible for the virtual radar display (and also the plan display) to reflect the weather at the proposed time of flight?



Thanks,



Mike.

Tricky to program but a great idea in my view. Perhaps the tempos could be displayed as slow cycle on the virtual radar display on a period of say 2 secs? I suggest a slow cycle so that it isn't seen as a warning flash.

I agree that if you specify a time for your flight, and that time lies within a change to a TAF, we should probably we depicting the changed TAF rather than the main part.

The problem comes with deciding which parts to display and whether or not to deal with TEMPOs and PROBs. If we make the decision that we won't deal with TEMPOs and PROBs right away but perhaps we just look at the most relevant BECMG for the time period, that might be a good place to start. We would also have to pick the TAF part that coincided with the time that you passed the aerodrome, which will obviously be later than your takeoff time.

What do you think?

I can see that TEMPOs and PROBs complicate things somewhat. As a compromise, how about decoding the BECMGs as Tim suggests, but add a "warning triangle" symbol if there are any TEMPOs, maybe with a "30" or "40" inside the triangle for PROBs. Hovering your mouse over the triangle would then update the graphic to depict the relevant portion of the TAF instead.



SkyDemon just keeps getting better - thanks to Tim and everyone else working to make these little improvements.



Mike.

I love the warning triangle idea. We'll take this slowly but in this week's release we will have time-sensitive TAF depiction in the virtual radar, with a warning triangle if there are any TEMPOs at the time you'll get to the area. It won't be interactive (yet) but the tooltip will still show the entire TAF text so it'll be possible to look at what the TEMPO is saying that way.

The weather icons on the main map will not change in this version but it's likely that we will do the same thing on the main map too eventually.