Reflections (sort of) on Aviation Weather

Regular readings of this blog know that I am a non-pilot aviation enthusiast as well as a weather enthusiast. Over the years, I have become acquainted with the NWS Aviation Weather Center website. I am grateful for the opportunity to sit in, as a non-pilot aviation enthusiast, to private pilot ground school a few years ago where I first learned the basics of the various aviation weather tools that pilots use. I augmented this with my own self study over the years. I appreciate that a good knowledge of aviation weather and the various tools available to pilots saves lives. But more than that, learning about aviation weather is somewhat complicated.

The origins of this post stems from reading an article on the AOPA website about a fly-in that the AOPA is hosting in Norman,  Oklahoma. Participants in this fly-in will have the privilege to tour the Aviation Weather Center for a small charge, and there is a two-day workshop, for more information go here. I would love to be in a position to go to any part of this event! But for various reasons, I can not.

I had decided when I first learned of this fly-in a few days ago on the AOPA website that I wanted to make a post about the Aviation Weather that both showed my respect for the staff of the NWC Aviation Weather Center and respected the complexity of Aviation Weather.

Knowing that AOPA Air Safety Institute (ASI)  does good work on air safety for pilots, and knowing that they have a lot of videos on various issues of air safety on their Youtube channel, I decided to find one of the videos on aviation weather. It turns out the the ASI was an eight part series on aviation weather for pilots that they call Weather Wise, the link to all eight videos on Youtube may be found here (or at least it was as I write this article on September 6th).

I am sharing here the first video in ASI's eight part Weather Wise series, called Weather Wise Gathering Information. The video is aimed at pilots who should already have a good working knowledge of the NWS Aviation Weather Center as well as at least one of the various private Aviation Weather Platforms used by pilots that are available on the web. For those of you who are not pilots, I hope that your take away is how important pre-flight weather planning and briefings are to all pilots (private, commercial, airline pilots, military pilots, ag pilots, tanker pilots, etc. etc).