Seven different models! How does one who typically decides whether,
when, and which way to go, by looking out the window, decide?

Much fun playing with this but, as Eric said, we'll have to wait a
couple of days before Moriarty Soaring kicks off again.

On 4/29/2017 7:26 AM, JS wrote:
On Saturday, April 29, 2017 at 4:02:16 AM UTC-7, Dan Daly wrote:
On Saturday, April 29, 2017 at 12:13:12 AM UTC-4, WaltWX wrote:
OK, guys... my apologies... for not posting sooner. I've been evaluating it.

Walt Rogers WX here...

Chris Galli announced on April 20th a beta of version 3 XCSkies. He must not have access to making announcements on this list. Not sure why he's not announcing on the Google XCSkies list.

Version 3 looks outstanding. You can see it he

https://v3.xcskies.com

Chris says it should work with you normal v2 logins.

Here's his April 20th post to a beta list of evaluators:

___________________________

Hey Everyone,

I'd like to send this inner circle of friends and fellow crushers the first look at the new XC Skies V3. I'm calling it an Alpha release for now until most of the bugs and website docs can be finished. The main map application is ready to be beaten up. Here's the link:

https://v3.xcskies.com

You can use your normal account to login and kick the tires. I'll setup a dummy account with a subscription in case you can't get your current one to work (if it's even active) . I'll send that later today.

The amount of new features combined with the additional models available provides something on the order of 10X more data, so it's been challenging to balance how best to allow quick access to the essence of the forecast, while preserving the details a single click away.

I'd love to get as much feedback and criticism anyone would like to provide. Feel free to send the link around to anyone else you think could provide good testing and feedback. I'm thinking that this can be polished up and released fully by the end of April. It's long overdue.

A few important things to know:

1. The HRRR 3km and NAM 3km are picking up details about the day's soaring potential that I didn't expect to see. For example, lines of lift and even cloud streets, along with the underlying surface convergences that are producing them. For example, look at the HRRR mid to late afternoon and turn on surface winds animation. You'll see exactly what I'm talking about. If this forecast turns out to be even half right, it's a major game changer for all of us looking to make more distance.

2. Wind animations are surprisingly useful it turns out. THere's a little "play" button on the wind bar that will set things in motion. In the settings you can click on the Glider / Balloon tracer option to insert an object into the wind flow. Watch where it ends up over time! You might be surprised how the vectors actually react. I'm amazed at how what I think the flow means and what actually happens physically. I guess the take away is that looking at a grid of wind barbs can be misleading at times.

3. The skew-T option is very basic right now, but might be my favorite new feature. You can click anywhere on the map for any model and time and instantly get back the native levels of the model's temperature and moisture profiles. I've added a blue line that connects the surface temps along the dry adiabat through the boundary layer profile, so it's instantly clear what the boundary layer details are.

4. Saving profiles and the state of the map and the plots should be very intuitive for most. There's a little color swath underneath the forecast hours that indicates where solar noon is for the center of the map. Because there are 3 times the number of forecast hours available than before, it was not obvious to me where the peak of the day was for any given day in the season, so this should help zero in on the important afternoon times.

5. There's also a new "sun clock" that is useful for small screen devices (and is default for the mobile version) that is literally a 24 hour clock with sun rise and sun set noted, along with solar noon. Again, it represents the center of the map.

6. The point forecasts work for all models and available times. If you have the GFS selected, it takes a few seconds, but you'll get back hourly values across the next 5 days! For the short term forecasts like the NAM and RUC and HRRR, you'll get back all of the data available, which might be less than a full day. Routes are crazy fast to create and change, with the plots responding sub-second. You can lay down a few zigs or zags and then change through the hours and models to see how they compare.

7. Really, there's a lot more, but I think it should be pretty obvious. If there needs to be explanations on some things, let me know so we can feature that in the docs (which are coming soon).

I can't wait to see how this new tuned version is going to work for our soaring community. I'm guessing it could be a game changer for XC planning and distance potential.

-Chris

On Tuesday, April 11, 2017 at 2:18:31 PM UTC-7, Mike the Strike wrote:
On Sunday, April 9, 2017 at 8:04:52 PM UTC-7, Jonathan Foster wrote:
Any new news on this? Excited to see what is new.
Now 14 days into the ten-day waiting period!

Mike
My current v2 login doesn't work - says "subscription required" when I try to look at this afternoon's forecast.
That's how it has been for me. No forecasts.
Jim

--
Dan, 5J