Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage

Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by bombcar on Thursday January 19, 2023 @09:50AM (#34440859)

Isn't there a way to rough out the dew point from the cloud base altitude? I seem to remember that from ground school.

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by victortroz on Thursday January 19, 2023 @10:27AM (#34441307)

I remember being the other way around, you could estimate height of the cloud based on dew point and base altitude.

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by dbrueck on Thursday January 19, 2023 @10:53AM (#34441636)

Yup! 400' AGL for every 1 deg C of temperature spread.

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by bombcar on Thursday January 19, 2023 @11:42AM (#34442302)

Yah! So you can find the dew point by flying up to just below the cloud and look at the altimeter and do some math ;)

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Re:Nationwide FAA weather reporting outage by jcutrell on Thursday January 26, 2023 @11:48AM (#34534238)

Yes, but generally this would be used the opposite direction. If cloud bases are unavailable, or if weather is changing rapidly, you could use say barometric pressure + dew point to determine "is this about to go south towards low clouds and low vis?"

(Also, cloud bases are part of the METAR info in the first place, so it's a "neither" situation)

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