Predicting thermal strength or estimating their presence in the past.

Hello, I'm relatively new to this group and require some peculiar assistance. Let em explain;

I'm looking at soaring birds in South America (specifically San Carlos de Bariloche in Argentina) and need to estimate either the presence of or the strength of thermal uplift in an area. The main limitation is that the experiment was carried out in 2008.
I've managed to gather some basic archive information such as temperature averages (unfortunately these are surface temperatures), as well as wind strength and direction averages.

I was wondering if any of you knew of a program or way of estimating any kind of thermal activity using these parameters (or perhaps other, easily gotten ones)? Or perhaps there is a databank of archived gliding conditions data somewhere that I could use?

Thanks loads for your time, even if you can't help!