Sounding Plugin - for paraglider pilots
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@vicb
What does those numbers mean?
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The intersection between the green and red lines is the top of thermals (1900ft on the screenshot) - that's how high glider pilots can expect to reach when flying.
The cursor is supposed to show the altitude - 68900 should be 21000(ft) but there was a bug with imperial units that I just fixed in 1.1.6. Thanks for reporting !
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@vicb
I think the scale on the left is wrong
(shows aprox. 1000ft less in low altitudes and 2000ft less in high altitudes).
example: point "A" marks the temp. at 300 hPa (30000 ft, FL300)
but the diagram shows 28300 (1700ft off). ..... -
..... at lower levels
point "B" marks the temp. at 600 hPa (13800 ft, FL140)
but the diagram shows 12000 ft (1800ft off). -
I really like the better-sounding plugin!
I have a few suggestions for improvement:
- make the Favorites display optional with a toggle button like 'Zoom View' - it takes a lot of screen real estate and if you're probing locations you might not necessarily limit yourself to favorite locations
- make the ground brown box translucent so you can see temp and dewpoint at low altitudes - the values vanish in the brown box like so: https://snipboard.io/p3Za7H.jpg (or maybe remove the brown box to start with and mark ground level with a line - the box adds no information per se)
- try the plugin on a a few mobiles (or mobile screen predefs in Chrome Dev Tools) - pretty much unusable. Width and height not adapted to screen size. Works great on a PC though.
thanks for adding this!
best regards,
Michael
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@mhaberler Thanks for the feedback Michael.
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Making the plugin better on mobile is something I plan to work on. Only a few users know that you can load plugins on mobiles so it was not high priority.
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Could you elaborate more on favorites, why is your use case usage ? One thing I was thinking about is to display only the 5/10 favorite spots closest to the current location to save screen real estate. However I ended up having < 15 favorites and haven't found it to be inconvenient. There is probably room for improvement here - we only need to find a good way.
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What would be the use to see below ground ? AFAIR it seems like some models do not have sensible values below ground level.
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@vicb right, continuation of dewpoints/temps 'underground' doesnt make any sense
now if you're looking into mobile screen real estate is an issue to start with, so maybe drop the brown box altogether and save some pixels for the skewt diagram - just start at ground level and record ground elevation
my use case: I use the traj plugin for planning balloon rides
so I pick a track which is likely and nice, and then check conditions along this path
'along this path' practically never translates into a favorite location - so in this case just used up screen space for no use
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The plugin is incredible Viclo, thank you
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Happy that you like it @grantonthefly
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Hopefully, we will get the functionality to able to load it from the windy quick menu on desktop instead of from menu bar everytime. Are you able to access your plugin on mobile?
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The fastest way to load the plugin is to visit https://www.windy.com/plugins/windy-plugin-sounding then you click on load an done.
It also works on mobile if you use a browser - unfortunately it doesn't work with the mobile app for security reason.
Note that because almost nobody knows how to load plugins in a mobile browser the plugin is not well suited for mobile yet but that's something I plan to work on over the coming month.
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@vicb said in Sounding Plugin - for paraglider pilots:
It also works on mobile if you use a browser
Hi, I use an iPad with the mobile browser (chrome) from time to time. How to load plugins by this way?
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@vicb
Thanks, your link works for me to get the Sounding Plugin on mobile browser on iPad.
Then further to this plugin, I have finally found how to get all plugins via mobile browser. Bookmark this URL on mobile browser, not in the app:
https://www.windy.com/plugins?47.398,0.704,5 -
Hi @vicb,
I noticed that the cloud level altitude (on the right) and the altitude scale (on the left) don't seem to match up. Do they use different units, or represent different things?
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Seems to perhaps be more noticeable when the zoom is off...
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Definitely a bug. I created https://github.com/vicb/windy-plugin-sounding/issues/6 and will work on it soon. Thanks for reporting.
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Hey @MarkRD could you please let me know what location and time lead to the bug ? I have problem to reproduce the issue.
The could base altitude that is see matches the actual altitude in my tests (when you hover on the graph you can see the altitude on the horizontal bar and the cloud base matches that at +/- 100m but that is due to rounding error).
What you pic shows is different. 3100m as no reason to be below 3000m.
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@vicb The location was S26 10'09'', E28 0'35''. Unfortunately, I don't know which GFS forecast time it was for exactly but it would have been for one of the hours yesterday (1st Oct 2020) - I'm not sure how to get the time slider to go back a day on windy.com.
I will keep an eye out for if I see something like it again (all my sounding plots today look fine with the cloud base altitude reflecting values within the vertical axis as one would expect). If I do see it again, I will add a comment on your issues page with more complete information (location, date, model, forecast hour etc) - apologies for that.
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@vicb I posted another instance I found on your github issue page. I hope it helps. I'm a bit suspicious that it happens with the same altitude again (in a different location).
I've only ever seen it happening with the GFS model, not ECWMF yet, if that is of any help.
