Workshop

25 - 26 November 2000

Neresheim, Germany

After opening this workshop on Friday evening a minute of silence was held in honour of Thomas Hafner, who died much to young and would be sadly missed by all his gliding friends.

1. Forecasts for Gliding

1. Input

Richard informed the group about measurements of vertical profiles ( pressure,temperature and humidity) using electric powered modelaircrafts. This is a cheap (about 1500 DM per system) and valuable method to get more information about the convective boundary layer up to 1500-2000 meters. If we could find reliable collaborators f.i. tow pilots, ultralight-pilots or balloonists ect., this dream of improving the input of the high resolution models could be realized.
2. Quality

Forecasting thermals in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is done with the Alptherm/Toptherm-model. The practical experience is good for mountain areas, but unsatisfying for flat countries. Olivier, the developer of the software, explained the physics of this model. Whereas the topography and the radisosonde-initialization works well, the coupling with the LMs (swiss and german limited area model) is very sensitive.

Integrating thermal driven local wind systems (foothillls of the alpine regions, seabreezes) will be the next step of development.

Forecasters from the flat areas have requested that the influence of the surface-effects should be taken into considerations.

3. Standardization of the output

Glider pilots operate more and more in different countries. So it makes sense to have a standardized gliding forecast which should be available on the internet. The products, available in the PC-Met from the german weather service are a good beginning to what pilots want to have, which is:
• interactive system with information for decision making on the first page/klick
• more detailed information about the forecasted flyable areas, when you klick again (time-height cross-sections for the development of thermal activity during the day)
• international agreement on the layout (same units and colours used in the forecasts)

Suggested improvements:

• Additional comments from the forecaster should be available on the first overview-page, to give some advice about the effect of the synoptic situation on gliding activities (f.i. dangerous or special phenomenas).
• A vision for the future could be a cross-section with individual time-adjusted weather forecasts for specific flight routes.
4. Evaluation

To improve gliding forecasts the cross-country flight data from the online contest files will be compared with the Top/Alptherm results by the DWD.

2. Internet-homepage www.pa.op.dlr.de/ostiv/

Martin informed about what is new on our homepage:

guestbook: for comments and questions, please look at this page from time to time and give your clever comments or answers.

If you have something new about OSTIV activities or projects, please feed our webmaster Martin, then he will update our homepage!

3. Handbuch

Status quo: during the Championships at Bayreuth obviously not all copies were sold by Thomas. Erland will be getting in touch with Thomas` wife in the near future. After getting the available copies we should all do our best to sell them.

For those who have an internet connection our "Handbuch" can also be downloaded.

future work: this Handbuch (or the english version?) should be updated continuously by our working group. In this case it will be necessary to change the format.

4. Waves

Wolf Dieter gave an impressive overview of the Mountain Wave Project in Argentina (at this time Klaus Ohlmann is flying world records again..). Carsten presented a cross-section showing the up and downdrafts in the trapped leewaves of the Andes. Very interesting, that it is not always the primary wave which has the strongest lift. It seems that due to the complex terrain the interferences produce also very complex wave strucures. To verify this, further measurements are necessary.

Mountain waves during south foehn conditions over the Alps were studied by two students from the University of Vienna. Analysing the files from the dataloggers of some cross-country flights is a first step towards a "climatology" of wave positions.

The Scorer-parameter for wave forecasting was evaluated and found to be a very helpful tool, which is now also available in the PC-Met.

future work: what about other wave phenomena, not orografically influenced ?

5. Events 2001

5.1. Training- Seminars

Where	When	Coordinator
St. Auban ?	3rd or 4th week in March	Denise
Birrfeld	1st week in May	Wolf Dieter
Lüsse	nd week in May	Carsten
Marocco	2002 ?

5.2. Next Workshop

23.- 25. November 2001 in Neresheim, BRD

5.3. OSTIV-Congress

Around Christmas time in South Africa.

Everybody is invited to motivate him/herself to present a paper or motivate somebody else to come and speak about something.

6. Dr. Joachim Küttner Prize

Our honory OSTIV member Joachim wants to personally give the prize of 5000.- US Dollar to the pilot who flies over 2000km in a straight line.

Manfred encouraged everybody to use all opportunities to make this known to the glider community .If you don't tell anybody else about this, we persume you are going to win...

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