That's why you can still buy weather radar and storm scopes. Tim's right. Nothing available for free over the internet is anywhere near to being real time. Still, useful for planning. It does give you a trend. Austria's doppler radar lags by about 5-10 minutes. That's pretty good, I think.

-- Chris.

It is crazy to think that such a worldwide amalgamated view on radar from different sources could be even slightly suitable for tactical use. People tend to forget even the time it takes for a radar head to do a full sweep (or several at multiple angles), let alone the subsequent processing, transmission and assembly time (into an amalgamated product).

In which countries do you believe internet-derived rainfall radar is suitable for tactical use?

Shifu, you mentioned that you turn our rainfall layer off in flight. In fact WE turn it off in flight by default every time you go flying, because it is NOT intended for tactical use. No internet-derived rainfall data is suitable for use in that way. I feel I must reiterate this every time somebody talks about doing that.

We have already prototyped integration of German GAFOR areas in SkyDemon but this will not happen until such time as we reach an agreement with DWD, as both the forecasts and the area definitions are their intellectual property. Discussions are ongoing.

I do not really believe that GAFOR is such a "standard" as the German areas have an extra level of openness that the alpine routes do not.

Hello Shifu

That cannot be confirmed, Gafor was an international matter. These color scheme was shown also based on parameters of international pretended. Based on that datas also Jepp was setting these overlay, which helps phantastic on longer trips and avoids surprises for VFR. The idea was not to overload the map, but switch between (Rain-Radar and Visibility-Ceiling) was in my opinion still ok!  Also on planning to avoid IFR.

But clear, to realised this request was certainly not easy. SD must select the Gafor areas, which are based on terrain and not on political boarders. Raw datas are free, but the conversation and translation will also not so easy. 

Let us be surprised, SD was all those years very innovative!

Coming now or in near future an GAFOR Overlay? Then the flight planning would be perfect in one package! The Gaforroutes A-CH-CZ were already integrated beautifully. Would that be theoretically possible for the rest of the country? Or was the problem DWD?

Tim, I understand the conundrum. And whatever thoughts and ideas I am likely to put on the table, you will have tried out already. Still, as a diligent beta tester I have to do this and pester you.

How about changing color and keeping transparency fixed with intensity. Then you would still be able to discern different intensities while having an opacity that show at least sufficient detail of the map to let me discern the general area I am looking at.

-- Chris.

What's wrong with simply turning it off? It's two touches of the screen.

Unfortunately you (we) can't have it both ways. If enough map stuff shows through widespread heavy rain to make the aeronautical features of the map still useful (everyone's definitions of "enough" will differ) then the rainfall will have been made so insignificant by comparison that lighter areas of rain might be missed entirely. If we make the rain distinctive and of varying opacity (the current situation) then (by necessity) large swathes of map will be obscured with widespread moderate to heavy rainfall.

The problem I have with the radar imagery covering up the map underneath is that widespread rainfall doesn't allow me to see the are where I am trying to plan my route. Case at hand: I wanted to fly from LHFM to LOAU, a 30 minute flight, albeit through some congested airspace. There was rain in the entire area but of varying intensity. Looking outside I knew that I could fly through the lighter stuff. However, I needed to be careful about where exactly my route goes because of the convoluted airspace. Alas, with the rain obscuring the entire map area, it was not very convenient to plan my route. In this case I would have preferred a transparent rain depiction which would have the underlying map showing through, at least in the areas of light rain.

-- Chris.