UK coverage is live at 4 km
The Convek API now serves high-resolution soaring forecasts across England, Wales, and southern Scotland. WRF at 4 km, four runs a day, every field available as JSON.
Blog
Notes from the soaring weather pipeline.
Deep-dives on WRF/RASP optimisation, region launches, and the fields the API serves. Written for pilots, developers, and anyone curious about how a regional soaring forecast actually gets made.
Categories
Optimisation
Deep-dives into tuning WRF and RASP for soaring - physics, resolution, and validation.
Coverage
New regions, domain design, and what a given geography means for soaring forecasts.
Field Explainers
What every output field means - wstar, cloudbase, day rating, and more.
Integrations
Case studies of apps, instruments and clubs built on the Convek API.
Dev Log
What shipped recently - monthly summaries of API, pipeline and site changes.
Essays
Longer-form notes on the soaring weather market and building a physics-heavy API.
Latest posts
Why run your own WRF at all?
Global weather models stop being useful for soaring long before you reach the thermal layer. Here's why Convek runs WRF at 4 km instead of serving GFS like everyone else.
Validating against soundings and XContest traces
A forecast is not useful unless it is right. We verify Convek against radiosonde soundings and XContest flight activity. Here is the validation setup and what it says about where we are weak.
Day rating is a label, not a magic number
`day_rating` is a composite label: poor, marginal, fair, good, or excellent. Under the hood it comes from an internal score, but the API returns a readable label. Here is how to interpret it without being misled.
MPI decompositions, hyperthreads, and a lost week of compute
Getting WRF to run fast on a 12-vCPU box is a solved problem if you know the answer. We did not know the answer. Here is the week of wrong turns that eventually got UK 4 km to ~33 minutes per cycle.