Practical IFR advice

[Awqward]

Here in Europe we private pilots rely heavily on products derived from the US NOAA GFS data (the same source for all T-skew plots and in fact all US weather products) for IFR...one really good site that uses this data is a Spanish site: www.ogimet.com which is English or Spanish...one really useful feature is to be able to plot a cross section of your route...the screen shot is for a 4 hour flight from Montgomery Field to Las Vegas....you can see it gives cloud levels, type of clouds, freezing level (including some indication of icing) , winds, precip etc.... You can check for a trip up to 10 days in advance...although it really only starts to get reliable about 3 days out...another useful graphic is for a single airport for the next 24 hours...the second screenshot is for my home airport....(pretty crappy!)

[Ned Gravel]

Great tool!!  I hope to try this out when I am back in Canada in December to see how good it is.

[Awqward]

It's pretty good... Except at predicting really low level stuff ie fog reduced vis...probably because these effects are greatly influenced by local factors... But cloud tops and bottoms are usually pretty close..,for stratus as well as convective clouds...,the GFS is yet another gift to the world from the U.S. taxpayer!

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[spaz]

http://weather.aero

[Awqward]

The flight path tool on that site is not bad...but doesn't appear as easy to interpret as the Ogimet Gramet...otherwise it is excellent!