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.
UK coverage is live. As of this week, the Convek API is serving high-resolution soaring forecasts for England, Wales, and southern Scotland. That means the Long Mynd, Dunstable, the South Downs, the Lakes, the Peak District, and up into the Scottish lowlands. 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. Every field Convek produces is 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. Trigger temperature. 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.
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, with typical data lag from cycle time to availability around 90 minutes.
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 well-instrumented with radiosonde sites (Larkhill, Herstmonceux, Lerwick) that 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. Convection is resolved explicitly at 4 km rather than parameterised. The physics stack (YSU PBL, Thompson microphysics, Noah-MP land surface, RRTMG radiation) is tuned for convective-scale UK forecasting. The full story lives on the model page, and the reasoning behind each choice is getting its own blog series.
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.