GIS (Geographic Information System) applications to soaring?

Is anyone out there applying GIS to soaring?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geograp...rmation_system

I've just started mucking with Quantum GIS (a free GIS tool) and the abundance of free maps and data to produce some custom maps relevant to soaring.

For example, in northern New England we soar over a sea of relatively cool forest with widely spaced hot spots that set off thermals. I've learned how to automatically measure surface temperature from the raw data that floats behind infrared satellite images, and I highlight the hotspots on a map. So now I have an automatically generated map that highlights all of the big patches of asphalt, quarries, rocky outcroppings, etc. in bright red. Using that map I can plan a task that flies between the likely thermal generators. It would be impossibly tedious to wade through this sea of information by visual inspection of a satellite photograph, but it's rather easy and largely automated with a few command lines in the QGIS tool.

There's lots of other GIS data available, but before I go down this rabbit hole, I'm wondering if anyone else is messing around in this area. I would like to compare notes.

I'm not doing anything like that for the moment, but I know of a pilot that collected IGC files for a particular area and created a "Thermal Location Map" which showed the position and strength of thermals over a large sample of days and months. Now he can head out with a pretty good idea of where to go for the highest probability of a thermal. You could probably "mine" the OCL files for similar plotting of thermal for your area.

Thermal plotting is a feature of Winpilot. It filters by wind direction and time of day. I have not heard of this feature being used by anyone I know. Has anyone here tried it?

On Saturday, March 30, 2013 10:00:45 PM UTC-5, SoaringXCellence wrote:
I'm not doing anything like that for the moment, but I know of a pilot that collected IGC files for a particular area and created a "Thermal Location Map" which showed the position and strength of thermals over a large sample of days and months. Now he can head out with a pretty good idea of where to go for the highest probability of a thermal. You could probably "mine" the OCL files for similar plotting of thermal for your area.

House thermal finder here we come!

There are couple of soaring predictions that leverage topography and land use data (that I know of).

Beda Sigrist makes Windmaps and Thermaps for the Alps and appear to be the closest match to your work. It appears to use GIS data near the resolutions you're using and probably the most relevant. I've emailed with him a bit about the maps.
http://www.aerodrome-gruyere.ch/thermap/
http://www.aerodrome-gruyere.ch/windmap/index.html

Dr. Jack's RASP forecasting does account for topography, land use, soil types, and sun angle in it's determination of surface heating. It uses 30 arc second resolution files for such features which means it can distinguish such features that are approx 0.9km square.
http://www.drjack.info/RASP/index.html
Although, most RASP users (in the US) run at 1.3km and 4km resolutions because of processing power limits. I'm just guessing, but these resolutions are probably too coarse for what you're trying to accomplish, still may be of interest though...

Currently, I'm working on setting up RASP to cover a segment of the Appalachian mountains from southwest VA through PA to northern NJ. This is how it sees the topography in 4km square resolution...
http://home.comcast.net/~akriz/aplcn_topo.png
You'll notice it cannot accurately depict individual ridges, which is slightly disappointing, but it's still better than the 12km and 20km resolutions that some weather models still use.

On Saturday, March 30, 2013 11:31:49 AM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:
Is anyone out there applying GIS to soaring?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geograp...rmation_system



I've just started mucking with Quantum GIS (a free GIS tool) and the abundance of free maps and data to produce some custom maps relevant to soaring..



For example, in northern New England we soar over a sea of relatively cool forest with widely spaced hot spots that set off thermals. I've learned how to automatically measure surface temperature from the raw data that floats behind infrared satellite images, and I highlight the hotspots on a map.. So now I have an automatically generated map that highlights all of the big patches of asphalt, quarries, rocky outcroppings, etc. in bright red. Using that map I can plan a task that flies between the likely thermal generators. It would be impossibly tedious to wade through this sea of information by visual inspection of a satellite photograph, but it's rather easy and largely automated with a few command lines in the QGIS tool.



There's lots of other GIS data available, but before I go down this rabbit hole, I'm wondering if anyone else is messing around in this area. I would like to compare notes.

On Sunday, March 31, 2013 4:31:49 AM UTC+13, son_of_flubber wrote:
Is anyone out there applying GIS to soaring?

I've used GDAL to create shaded relief maps to use as background maps for SeeYou and also OGIE.

http://www.omarama.net/gliding.html

--
Philip Plane