Decentralised forecasts for the Western Cape Province of South Africa (SW South Africa).

BLIPMAP^TM = Boundary Layer Information Prediction MAP.
This software was created by Dr. John W. (Jack) Glendening, Meteorologist.
These forecasts were run using a locally-run WRF model.
These forecasts have been run on computer(s) and published on a website located in South Africa.
These pages are maintained by Ian Forbes of the Cape Gliding Club.
Bandwidth and computing resources to generate and publish these forecasts has been supplied by ZSD.

Links to Forecasts:

• Dr Jack's "day before" forecasts
• Evening Forecast.
  • Standard Index Page
  • Directory Listing
• Overnight Forecast.
  • Standard Index Page
  • Directory Listing
• Paul Hopes Forecasts

Both the local forecast system and the upstream software is under active development. These pages are produced on an "amateur" basis and some hiccups and glitches can be anticipated. The service should be regarded as a "beta" one.

Description of Published forecasts:

Two forecasts are published daily. Note all times are local South African time, 2 hours earlier than UTC:

• The first is based on meteorological data collected up to 14h00 on the day before the forecast and are completed after 22h00. This forecast is optimized for early publication.
• The second is based on meteorological data from 18h00 and are completed after 04h00. This forecast is optimized for accuracy and detail.

Both cover a time period for the following soaring day. The two can be expected to differ and the 2^nd should be more accurate. The wide area (12km resolution) forecasts become available before the 4km resolution ones and the forecasts for 14h00 become available before those for 17h00. Thus pilots planning tasks may start looking before the publish times to see what early information is available. The directory listing with timestamps will help in determining which data has been published recently.

Forecasts for the SW South Africa area are still being published on the main RASP website. However this can be expected to change at some state in the future as Dr Jack has indicated that he has plans to use some of his resources to developing more products of benefit to more soaring pilots.

Forecast Times:

• The date and time that the forecast applies to, this is clearly displayed on each graphic.
• The time of the latest actual meteorological data that the forecast model was based on. This is indicated as the number of hours between the last data and the time of the forecast.

Feedback:

If you have any questions or feedback regarding the RASP software, please join the RASP forum and publish your comments there. They will be read by all users of RASP world wide, including Dr Jack, author of the software.

If you have any queries regarding the local publishing of these pages, please post a message on the CGC Discuss mailing list. I assume that most keen users of these forecasts are already on that list. If you interested in soaring weather in the area of these forecasts, you are welcome to subscribe to this list, even if you are not a member of the Cape Gliding Club.

Problems:

If the forecasts don't appear when expected, or if you find a particular bug, you may e-mail be directly, or if it is seriously effecting your task planning, you may even send me an SMS, but please don't phone me either at home or at work.

Disclaimer:

Use this information entirely at your own risk! There is no guarantee that there will be any similarity between the forecasts and the actual weather. There may even be fundamental errors - like I may have typed in the co-ordinates wrong or that the time clock on my computer may be out by a few hours!