Soaringmeteo development
Created by Soaringmeteo developers
for Julien Richard-Foy
Soaringmeteo is a non-profit association that provides free weather forecasts for paraglider and hang glider pilots worldwide. So far, thanks to your support, our running costs (servers, hosting) have been covered by your donations. All server support, code maintenance, and administration is done by our small team in our free time.
Today, our lead developer Julien Richard-Foy would like to spend time working on the project before taking on a new job. We request your support by making a donation to him. We want to increase by an order of magnitude the number of points shown in the alpine high-resolution forecast (see the screenshots below).
Donors making significant contributions can request features/changes. We also encourage code contributions from the open-source community.
Why do we need your help?
A couple of years ago, we started rewriting our system from scratch to get something easier to use, easier to maintain, more efficient, and with a higher spatial resolution. We are proud of the current status of soarV2, which provides a forecast with 25 km resolution, worldwide, for the next 9 days.
The next milestone would be to display our high-resolution forecasts for the Alps area (based on the WRF model) in the new interface. The main benefit will be that we will show the forecast results at many more locations than what soarWRF currently does, as shown in the following screenshots.
Current view of an arbitrary location in Jura with soarWRF.
The same location, with a prototype of soarV2. It will show the thermal quality at many more points, and it will show the wind speed for each point.
Getting there requires substantial development, which is why we ask for your help. Our lead developer, Julien Richard-Foy, is temporarily free of professional constraints. Before taking on a new job, he is interested in using his time to work on Soaringmeteo. Since he would have no income during this time, we request your support by making a donation to him.
If you cannot donate money, your code contributions are welcome. The project is open-source and its repository is here: https://github.com/soaringmeteo/soaringmeteo.
How will the collected money be used?
All the funds will be directly collected by our lead developer, Julien Richard-Foy, as a compensation for his work.
Our main priority is to display high-resolution forecasts for the Alps in the new interface, which requires completing the following tasks:
- Change the technology we use to display the map overlays to support the resolution of our WRF domain (2 km)
- Process the output of the WRF model to produce files optimized for display on the new interface
- Update the meteograms and sounding diagrams to support the WRF output
- Update the user interface to allow the users to switch between models and areas
A nice side effect is that these changes will allow us to also expand the coverage of the worldwide GFS model (currently, many areas in America, Africa, or Asia are poorly covered), and to further refine the area covered by the WRF model.
If he collects 5,000 €, Julien will be able to work on the project until the end of October. If you donate more money, you will allow him to work even longer on Soaringmeteo! We have many pending tasks such as showing pressure difference graphs, supporting different types of “thermal quality” indicators (the current one is designed for paragliders in mountain terrain but does not work so well on flatlands or for sailplanes), or improving the user experience (especially on mobile devices).
Pass it on!
Please share this page with your friends and contacts to help us raise funds to make Soaringmeteo a better service and ensure its continuity.
Contributions
75Jocelyne treize
david zimmerli
Andreas Klostermann
Anonymous
Olivier Dunant
Para-Deltaclub Stockhorn
Philip de Boer
Anonymous
Anonymous
Philip de Boer
- November 15, 2023
Soaringmeteo developers
After one month and half, I am happy to report that I have completed the project! You can now see the high-resolution (2 km) forecast results for the Alpine area in soarV2: https://soarwrf1.soaringmeteo.org/v2/?lat=46.389&lng=9.052&z=7.9&zone=central-alps&model=wrf I just updated this page to describe the differences between the user interface of soarWRF and soarV2: https://soaringmeteo.org/towards-soarV2/?lang=en#from-soarwrf (also available in French) I hope you are happy with the result, feel free to give me your feedback by email ([email protected]). THANK YOU again for your support! Without your donations, I might not have been able to dedicate that much time to this project. I will close the money pot at the end of the week. - October 31, 2023
Soaringmeteo developers
Today is the last day of October so it’s a good time to report on what I’ve been doing in the past month. I am halfway to reaching my goal of displaying the detailed results of our high-resolution Alpine forecasts, and I would still appreciate your support! In October, I made several experiments to find a technical solution that scales to our needs, I migrated soarV2 to the selected technology, and I partially implemented the rendering of our high-resolution forecasts. You can see the result here: https://soarwrf1.soaringmeteo.org/v2-dev In the “layers” menu, select the WRF model, and one of the covered zone. Then, play with the various overlays (e.g. thermal velocity, rain, wind at various altitudes, etc.). However, note that I did not yet implement the meteograms for the WRF model. You can also watch a video that I just recorded where I look at the XC flying potential over the Europe, and I zoom into the South of France, and switch to the WRF model for more precision. It seems that around Col de Bleyne will be flyable tomorrow! https://soarwrf1.soaringmeteo.org/v2-dev/demo.webm Last, note that I have also changed the way we render the GFS model. Instead of dealing with “points”, we now deal with “zones”. In the process, I have significantly expanded the coverage of the South Hemisphere, I hope this will be useful to the pilots there since the season just started! I am super happy about what I’ve done, but as I said above, I didn’t reach my goal yet. My progress was slowed down by unanticipated challenges when I migrated soarV2 to the new engine. I still need to update the implementation of the meteograms and sounding diagrams to handle the WRF forecast data, and then I will improve the user interface to make it more intuitive and easy to use on small screens. Now comes the part where I request again your support to fund my work. I received a lot of money already: 5,500 € in total (some donators preferred to give directly to me instead of going through Leetchi), and I am extremely grateful to you! I could spend almost all of my time on the project (17 days in total, to be precise). However, since I now estimate that I need more weeks to complete the project, I will keep the money pot open, and I would appreciate if you can still support me!