Many of you will be aware of the South Australian temp traces available on my web site, at http://slash.dotat.org/atmos/
Unfortunately for most of the denizens of this mailing list, though, the data available at that site is only useful for pilots flying relatively close to Adelaide (because the atmospheric sounding comes from a balloon launched from Adelaide airport). If you don't live near Adelaide, the best you've been able to get is the daily F160 chart from the Bureau of Meteorology, which has all the useful data on it, but is -- shall we say -- less than user-friendly. For the last 12 months, Daryl Mackay from WA has been lobbying the Bureau of Meteorology and Airservices Australia to gain access to the data obtained from balloon flights all over Australia. His rationale has been that since the F160 is provided by BoM as a free service, it'd be very useful if the data behind the F160 was also available. After a year of negotiation, Daryl has organized access to the information. I've spent a couple of days writing software to present it in a useful manner. I think I'm ready to unleash the results on an unsuspecting public, so I now direct your attention to http://slash.dotat.org/cgi-bin/atmos This new site contains -national- sounding information, instead of just the Adelaide data. Simply select the site closest to you and hit the submit button, and you'll see an aerological diagram produced from the most recent BoM balloon flight, containing temperature, dewpoint, wind speed and wind direction against altitude. But that's not all -- You can also look at histoical data. As the BoM releases data, it's being sucked into my database, and once it's in the database it's never deleted. There's a menu of times and dates which you can pick and choose once you've told the facility about which launch site you're interested in. I only have a couple of days worth of data so far, but as time goes by I feel that this will become quite a useful statistical resource. Have a look at it and tell me what you think. Also, if you have any friends in the hang glider or paraglider community, pass the URL to them too. I want this to be a useful resource for all soaring pilots in Australia, for compeition forecasters, daily briefings, cross country planning, you name it. So: That URL again: http://slash.dotat.org/cgi-bin/atmos Enjoy! - mark -------------------------------------------------------------------- I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED] but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton ----- Voice: +61-4-1620-2223 ------------- Fax: +61-8-82231777 ----- -- * You are subscribed to the aus-soaring mailing list. * To Unsubscribe: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * with "unsubscribe aus-soaring" in the body of the message * or with "help" in the body of the message for more information.
