Live - 4 km

Austria - Soaring Weather API

High-resolution WRF forecasts across every flying area in Austria. Zell am See, Kössen, Greifenburg, Stubai, Bramberg, Werfenweng, Achensee, Gerlitzen, the Dachstein - thermal strength, MSL cloudbase, soaring height, convergence, full forecast soundings, served as JSON four times a day.

Model specifications

ModelWRF (Weather Research & Forecasting)
Resolution4 km
Domainthe Austrian Alps from Vorarlberg in the west to the Burgenland in the east
Updates4× daily - 00z, 06z, 12z, 18z UTC
Vertical levels40+ pressure levels from surface to 50 hPa
InitialisationNOAA GFS global model
StatusLive

What you get for Austria coverage

All fields available now at 4 km.

Thermal Strength

wstar_ms - thermal updraft velocity in m/s

Soaring Height

hglider_agl_m + hglider_msl_m - usable thermalling height

Cloudbase

cloudbase_agl_ft + cloudbase_msl_m, Cu potential, OD risk

Wind

surface_wind_* plus wind_925_*, wind_850_*, wind_800_*, wind_700_*

Trigger Temperature

thermal_trigger_temp_c - surface temperature at which thermals fire

Day Rating

day_rating - poor, marginal, fair, good, excellent

Corridor Sampling

Weather along a route - time-aware available

Sounding Profile

Full vertical profile - temp, dewpoint, wind

Query Austria forecasts in seconds

Pass region, resolution, and any covered coordinate - the API resolves the nearest model grid point and returns the forecast.

Request

curl "https://api.convek.dev/v1/site?region=at&resolution=4km&lat=46.75&lon=13.18&time=13:00" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer cvk_live_your_key_here"

Response

{
"valid_date": "2026-05-09",
"valid_time": "13:00",
"rasp_model": "at/4km",
"site": {
"wstar_ms": 2.2,
"hglider_agl_m": 965,
"cloudbase_agl_ft": 3660,
"cloudbase_msl_m": 2449,
"surface_wind_speed_ms": 4.5,
"surface_wind_dir_deg": 211,
"day_rating": "fair"
}
}

About soaring weather in Austria

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.

Two fields worth flagging for Austria specifically: MSL cloudbase, because launch altitudes range from valley sites at 600 m to mountain take-offs at over 2000 m and the AGL number on its own does not tell you whether you can clear the next ridge; and the day rating, which uses the same scoring function as every other country so 'good over Greifenburg' is directly comparable to 'good over the Long Mynd'. Day-window and sounding labels use Europe/Vienna.

Austria coordinate range

The live at/4km region covers the Austrian Alps from Vorarlberg in the west to the Burgenland in the east. Valid coordinates for queries sit inside this bounding box:

Latitude

45.8° N - 49.6° N

Longitude

8.8° E - 17.9° E

Requests outside this domain return 400 Bad Request with a message explaining the coordinates are outside at coverage. See the coverage overview for other regions.

Start querying Austria soaring data now.

Free tier - 25 queries/day. No credit card required.