NAM, RUC, GFS, HRRR, WYSIWYG

Analyzing the weather and coming up with a local soaring forecast is always interesting, and usually fun.  The hard part is choosing which computerized "weather model" to use.  The available weather models, identified by strange acronyms, are so numerous that at least one of them is usually right.

Not so yesterday.  All of the models were wrong, and we were fooled by the actual weather twice in one day.

Moshe or Greg (not sure which) called a Slacker Day earlier in the week, and both were optimistic that we would be able to get an early start on Friday.

The optimists showed up at 0900, and it was immediately apparent that the day would be a bust - solid overcast at 6000 feet. We resigned ourselves to doing errands and maintenance, and trying to figure out how we could be so wrong about the weather.

But we were wrong about being wrong. Around noon, the sky cover started to break up, and as the blue areas got bigger, the gliders began to line up at the end of the runway, competition style.  We launched ten gliders in 90 minutes: one flight each for 2W, 3BA, AT, DC, EA, HG, JD, PM, RU, S1, and most of them stayed in the air until the unpredictable overcast moved in again.  Paul reported a 9 knot climb toward the end of the day.

I've gone back to looking out the window for my weather forecasts.