Skysight

[Dan Marotta]

Looking at today's forecast for Moriarty, NM, USA for 1300 local time
brings up a question.Â* I've always considered the thermal height, cloud
base, etc., to be MSL altitudes.Â* Indeed, looking directly at Moriarty
shows 11,500' which is reasonable given the time and date.

Moving a bit west, however, to the area of Edgewood, shows a blue blob
with an indicated altitude of 2,500'.Â* Now I know Edgewood's elevation
to be somewhat above 6,000' MSL.Â* So is there a big hole in the ground
that I haven't seen, is the height of thermals in AGL, is there an error
in the program, or am I missing something?

Inquiring minds and all...
--
Dan, 5J

[[email protected]]

On Saturday, 14 September 2019 11:21:50 UTC-3, Dan Marotta wrote:
> Looking at today's forecast for Moriarty, NM, USA for 1300 local time
> brings up a question.Â* I've always considered the thermal height, cloud
> base, etc., to be MSL altitudes.Â* Indeed, looking directly at Moriarty
> shows 11,500' which is reasonable given the time and date.
>
> Moving a bit west, however, to the area of Edgewood, shows a blue blob
> with an indicated altitude of 2,500'.Â* Now I know Edgewood's elevation
> to be somewhat above 6,000' MSL.Â* So is there a big hole in the ground
> that I haven't seen, is the height of thermals in AGL, is there an error
> in the program, or am I missing something?
>
> Inquiring minds and all...
> --
> Dan, 5J

I would suggest directing these types of inquiries to us directly at , preferably with a screenshot.

In this case though, I think what you are seeing is an unintended consequence of Height of Thermals being set to 0 rather than terrain height when there are no thermals in a given location. This is intentional so you get nice clear/unfilled holes demarcating areas of no thermals rather than a potentially misleading colour value in areas of high topography. But then in the final stage of rendering there's a small degree of smoothing which is 'smearing' that zero value back to a positive, but below ground value. It probably should know to not smooth zero value areas, that will get fixed at some point.