Visualizing Local Weather Characteristics Interpreted from Glider GPS Flight Logs

Abstract

Visualization can aid in improving the validation and evaluation of glider flight logs, which in turn can make the logs more meaningful in flight evaluation and planning. This paper presents techniques to interpret and visualize local weather characteristics derived from glider flight logs. Although glider flight logs only contain discretely sampled position and elevation records, local weather characteristics such as thermal lift and wind velocity can be interpreted from the temporal and spatial components in the logs. A total number of 397 flight logs were used in this study, statistics were performed to identify strong thermal locations, maximum flight altitudes, and weather patterns along flight routes. When the derived thermal features are geo-referenced with 3D terrain models, results support post-flight evaluation and pre-flight planning. For a given flight task, the pilot can derive an optimal flight path based on the presented visualization techniques and the statistics obtained from the historical records.