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, forecast fields available as JSON.
UK coverage is live. As of this week, the Convek API is serving high-resolution soaring forecasts for England, Wales, and southern Scotland. That covers the gliding heartlands - the Long Mynd, Dunstable, Lasham, Sutton Bank, Aboyne, Bidford - and the major paragliding sites: Mam Tor and Bradwell in the Peak District, Pandy and Hay Bluff on the Welsh border, Westbury White Horse, Combe Gibbet, Ditchling and Devil's Dyke on the South Downs, and the Lake District ridges. Any coordinate inside the domain, any time over the next 48 hours, available as JSON.
This is the first region to go live on Convek, and it is the foundation everything else is built on. The whole pipeline, from raw GFS ingest to the API response you see when you query `/v1/site`, has now been run end to end, four times a day, with real pilots checking the output.
What you get. The core live forecast fields are available for the UK region today. Thermal strength as `wstar_ms` in m/s. Glider-capped thermalling ceiling as `hglider_agl_m`. Cloudbase in both metres MSL and feet AGL. Surface and upper-level winds. A day rating from poor to excellent. Full vertical soundings. Route corridor sampling with time-aware mode, which is genuinely unique in this space. `thermal_trigger_temp_c` is present in the schema but nullable until the trigger diagnostic ships.
The model runs four times a day, at 00z, 06z, 12z, and 18z UTC, matching the GFS global cycle that provides the initial conditions. Each cycle produces a 48 hour forecast at hourly resolution. The API automatically serves from the freshest completed cycle. The Convek pipeline itself runs end-to-end in around 34 minutes for the trimmed UK domain on the live worker, on top of GFS's own publication lag of roughly 3.5 hours after cycle time, so a forecast initialised at 06z is typically available through the API by mid-to-late morning local. `/v1/status` shows when the freshest cycle landed.
Valid coordinates sit roughly between 50.0 N to 56.5 N latitude and 6.0 W to 2.0 E longitude. The UK coverage page has the exact coordinate box and the full field list.
Why UK first. The UK has one of the most active soaring communities in Europe, a hard terrain and weather mix that punishes global models, and a community that has been underserved by closed, browser-only forecast products for years. It is also where I fly. Starting at home means the first people checking forecast quality against reality are pilots I know.
Technically, it is also a hard case in the right way. The UK is small enough to run cheaply at 4 km, varied enough that the domain actually exercises the model, and close enough to a useful upper-air observation network to make validation tractable. If the pipeline works for the UK, it will work anywhere.
Behind the scenes, the pipeline runs WRF-ARW at 4 km over a domain that covers England, Wales, and southern Scotland, initialised from NOAA GFS at 0.25 degrees. The physics stack today is the well-trodden default set: YSU PBL, WSM3 microphysics, Noah land surface, RRTM/Dudhia radiation, with Kain-Fritsch cumulus still active at this resolution. Each of those choices has its own trade-offs and its own blog post, and most of them have a planned upgrade in the queue.
What is next. 2 km resolution over the same UK domain is already in development on the same server. After that, the next region will almost certainly be continental Europe (France, the Alps, or Spain depending on demand) and then we will work through the list on the coverage page. If you want a region prioritised, the waitlist on that page is the signal I use to decide.
How to try it. The free tier is 25 queries a day, no credit card. That is enough to build a personal pre-flight dashboard, a club briefing widget, or to test an integration. For commercial use there are developer plans from £39 a month, and a partner tier for instrument makers and redistributors. Full pricing is on the pricing page.
If you are a UK pilot, a club running forecast displays, an app developer building soaring tooling, or an instrument maker embedding weather data in cockpit systems, this is the launch you have been waiting for. Go have a play and tell me what breaks.