Austria coverage is live at 4 km

Austria is on. From this morning the Convek API serves 4 km soaring forecasts across every flying area in the country: Zell am See, Kössen, Greifenburg, Stubai, Bramberg, Werfenweng, Achensee, Gerlitzen, the Dachstein, and everything in between from Vorarlberg in the west to the Burgenland in the east.

Austria is the country where the case for a regional model writes itself. The Tirol valleys do not share a morning inversion - launch on Bramberg can be working an hour before launch on Wildkogel forty kilometres away, and a global model averaging across both is wrong about both. Föhn is a synoptic-to-mesoscale interaction that needs real terrain to compute, not a smoothed 13 km surface. Convergence lines along the main Alpine ridge are exactly the kind of mesoscale feature a 4 km grid resolves cleanly and a coarser model parameterises into mush. Most of what makes Austrian flying interesting only exists at this scale.

The compute cost is the largest in the European batch so far. The Austria domain stretches 8.8 E to 17.9 E and 45.8 N to 49.6 N - a longer rectangle than Switzerland, with broadly the same north-south extent. End-to-end runtime is around 23 minutes per cycle. That is comfortably inside what the worker can sustain four times a day with the rest of Europe in the schedule, but it is the country that started to make the multi-country scheduler earn its keep.

The core live Convek fields are available everywhere in the box. The two worth flagging for Austria specifically are MSL cloudbase and the day rating. Launch altitudes range from valley sites at 600 m to mountain take-offs at over 2000 m, and the AGL cloudbase number on its own does not tell you whether you can actually clear the next ridge - you want the absolute altitude. The day rating, meanwhile, uses the same scoring function as every other country, so 'good over Greifenburg' is directly comparable to 'good over the Long Mynd', which makes a difference if you are deciding whether to drive ten hours.

Soundings are worth a special mention here. Austrian XC is a sounding-driven discipline more than most, because the inversion behaviour is so much of the day. Convek's `/v1/sounding` returns the full vertical profile at any point, every forecast hour, as JSON. The renderer is your problem, deliberately - every integrator wants slightly different chart axes - but the underlying data is right there.

The rectangle is buffered into Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary so that the outer-cell GFS contamination sits outside the country itself. That matters most along the southern border, where the high Carinthian terrain meets the Italian and Slovenian flatlands and the gradient is sharp - any boundary contamination there would make for a noticeably worse forecast right where the convergence flying happens. The day-window and sounding labels use `Europe/Vienna`.

Cadence is the same four cycles a day at 00z / 06z / 12z / 18z UTC, 49 hour horizon, hourly resolution. The 06z forecast lands before late morning local time.

Czechia next week, then a pause on country additions while the validation work catches up. Five countries running four times a day is enough rectangles for the moment - the next thing the project needs is a proper way to score the forecast against radiosonde soundings and pilot reports, not another shape on the map. Spain is benchmarked and waiting; it will get its own release later when its longer runtime can be scheduled cleanly.

Free tier remains 25 queries a day, no card. `region=at` plus a `lat` / `lon` to `/v1/site`. Full coordinate box on the Austria coverage page, and the API docs have the rest. If you fly Austria, instruct or guide there, or are building tools for the Austrian pilot base, plug it in and tell me what breaks.