You may have noticed a couple of odd looking entries at the bottom of the front page of the WingBeat website. It looks a bit like this:

Rasp forecast:
Flyable  : Sun Yes; Mon 0; Tue Yes; Wed 0; Thu Yes; Fri Yes; |
| XC : Sun 3 ; Mon 0 ; Tue 5 ; Wed 0 ; Thu 2 ; Fri 0 ; |
| Evening : Sun Yes; Mon 0; Tue Yes; Wed 0; Thu Yes; Fri 0;

We are trying out a new feature that predicts whether it'll be flyable in the borders on each day based on forecast data. In addition it'll try and predict whether it'll be a cross country day and how good the day might be on a scale of 1 to 6. The idea is to help with planning your week, a lot like the original Weather Jack website.

Every day the next five days is going to be listed with a 0 if it doesn't look flyable and a "yes" if it does. If the forecast shows it may be a cross country day then the "XC" section show with a number up to 6 giving an idea about the quality of the day.

I've chosen some sensible values and limits but obviously a bit of fine tuning is going to be necessary. If you think it got a prediction for a day wrong let me know. Also if you think the data could be displayed a bit better then give me your suggestions.

More Detail...

At around seven each morning RASP is polled for 1pm data and several factors are checked that would prevent it being flyable if they had the wrong values. The wind should be no more than 7 knots, it should be less than 0.3mm rain per hour and the cloud base should be above 2000 feet. If one of these is out then the day is marked as zero or unflyable.

For XC conditions, a few more factors are checked. The thermal lift needs to be above 250 feet per minute and the day's star rating needs to be above 1.5. Also the wind can be up to 10 knots because I'm making the assumption that on an XC day you're likely to have taken off earlier than the 1pm time that the values are taken from.

This front page footer information is based on rasp for twitter as set up in the dales by Pete Logan. Any randomness has been added by me (Jamie)

The information is based blipspot chart for "the Kip" site or thereabouts as this is relatively central to the wingbeat sites.