There are many kinds of ways to represent the surface pressure. The one that most pilots are familiar with is the altimeter setting. It’s typically provided to pilots on a standard briefing and may be obtained by pilots on the ground or in flight by air traffic control or by...

Every pilot must get beyond the generalizations and simple rules of thumb that rarely apply especially when Mother Nature is at her worst. When the weather is even remotely challenging, the need to work hard to put together an objective analysis of the weather using a method that works every time is paramount. In this preview you will learn...

On October 1, 2008, the Aviation Weather Center in Kansas City began issuing a new forecast called a Graphical-AIRMET. This new forecast product, dubbed the G-AIRMET, won't make it into a standard briefing with an Automated Flight Service Station (AFSS) specialist and it won't likely be included in a DUATS textual briefing either. That's because it is not a text-based product like the traditional AIRMET; instead, it is designed to...

Pilots are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of preflight weather resources available online. There’s no doubt that one of the major roadblocks in using many of these new weather tools is knowing how to read the various date-time stamps that are buried somewhere within this guidance. There just doesn’t appear to be any ...

Thermodynamic diagrams such as the Skew-T log (p) are one of the best kept secrets in aviation. Based on data from radiosondes (weather balloons), they can be used to depict actual environmental temperature and actual environmental dewpoint as a function of pressure or altitude. They can also be used to depict the forecast environmental temperature and dewpoint based on output from a weather prediction model. In this preview you will learn...