Mike Olbinski's spectacular time lapse photography of convective flow

At 13:28 17 July 2016, son_of_flubber wrote:
On Friday, July 15, 2016 at 10:49:45 AM UTC-4, Dave Nadler
wrote:
Very nice!
Several segments clearly show where the lift can be found
under
developing shelf,
as well as the sink/virga/rain location.

Do people deliberately soar under this sort of developing shelf
clouds?

That is how they made the first longer distance flights in gliders
from the Wasserkuppe back in the '30's. My father told of how they
would bungee cord launch into an oncoming cell, and then they
would ride the shelf (like ridge soaring) and just go wherever the
cell took them downwind. Then, just before dark, they would
penetrate as far forward out into the projected path of the storm as
they could, land and tie the glider down real quickly before the
storm overran them. Most of the time, they had about 10 minutes
to tie it down. That was before they had variometers, and all the XC
flying was either on a ridge or pacing back and forth under a
thunderstorm shelf....

Once they had variometers, they would climb up inside
thunderstorms (needle-ball-airspeed) to 25,000' (without oxygen)
or whenever they hit hail. Then, they would either fly out the side
of the storm, or spin it out of the bottom. That is how my father got
his Diamond altitude back in the 1938 German Nationals, but that's
another story.....

RO
(the contest number given to my father, Rudy Opitz, in 1952 when
he flew the Horten IV at the nationals in TX, and the same number I
still use today...)