About Flyfun Weather

Flyfun Weather is an exploratory weather briefing tool for general aviation pilots. Its goal is to help you form an early picture of how weather patterns are coming together by comparing multiple numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. At its core, the briefing translates model data into aviation-focused advisories — icing risk, convective potential, cloud ceilings, turbulence, crosswinds — rated green/amber/red so you can quickly see what matters for your route. An altitude advisory even suggests the best flight level based on the combined conditions.

Beyond the advisories, Flyfun Weather lets you see where models agree and where they diverge, so you can gauge forecast confidence days before a planned flight. The briefing offers two display modes: compact mode for a quick overview of the essentials, and full detail mode that exposes all the raw data — soundings, cross-sections, thermodynamic indices, per-model values — with explanations, giving you full transparency into the numbers behind any summary.

Flyfun Weather is designed primarily for longer-range planning — helping you build a picture of weather trends days before a flight. As the flight date approaches, it adds real-time METAR/TAF observations for a final cross-check, but you should always verify against official sources (SIGMETs, AIRMETs, national aviation authority briefings) before flying.

Flyfun Weather is open-source and available on GitHub.

Getting Started

  1. Create a flight on the Flights page by entering your waypoints (airports, navaids, or fixes), date, time, altitude, and ceiling.
  2. Open the briefing by clicking the flight card. Flyfun Weather will fetch forecast data from each enabled model, run thermodynamic analysis, compute advisories, and generate a synopsis.
  3. Refresh the briefing at any time to pull the latest available forecasts. Each refresh creates a new snapshot you can compare via the history dropdown.
You can configure which NWP models to use and tune advisory thresholds in Settings.

The Briefing Page

The briefing is organized into collapsible sections. Here's what each one shows:

Toolbar

At the top of every briefing, the toolbar shows the route, gives you access to Refresh, PDF download, Email, Feedback, and the Tour button (the ?-icon). A Compact / Full Details toggle controls how much detail each section shows — compact is best for a daily glance, full for deep dives. The history dropdown lets you re-open any past snapshot to compare how the forecast has evolved. Flight owners can also toggle privacy (private flights are owner-only; public flights get a shareable short link via the Share icon) and configure a daily auto-refresh with email notification.

Overall Assessment

The banner at the top of the briefing is a colour-coded one-line verdict (GREEN, AMBER, or RED) derived from the worst-rated advisories. It's the headline read on your flight before you dig into the detail below.

Route Advisories

Advisories are the heart of the briefing. They translate raw NWP model data into aviation-relevant assessments that help you make early decisions about flying, cancelling, or adjusting the timing of a flight.

Each advisory is rated GREEN, AMBER, or RED based on configurable thresholds. Advisories are evaluated per-model, so you can see whether models agree on a hazard or only one flags it. The summary rating shown for each advisory reflects the worst-case across all models.

Advisory categories include:

  • Icing — freezing level, icing intensity at cruise altitude, temperature/humidity overlap in the icing zone.
  • Convection — CAPE, lifted index, convective inhibition, and storm potential along the route.
  • Cloud & Visibility — cloud base height relative to your ceiling, coverage, and visibility conditions at departure and arrival.
  • Turbulence & Wind — vertical wind shear, crosswind components at departure and arrival airports, headwind/tailwind along the route.
  • Airport Conditions — surface wind, gusts, and crosswind at departure and arrival relative to available runways.
  • Altitude Advisory — analyses conditions at multiple flight levels and suggests the best altitude considering winds, icing, turbulence, and cloud avoidance.

You can enable, disable, and tune the thresholds of each advisory in Settings, as well as choose which analysis methods are used for icing and cloud detection.

METAR/TAF Observations

On the day of the flight, a METAR/TAF section is shown with current observations and TAF forecasts for your departure and arrival airports, fetched from official aviation weather sources. Useful for cross-referencing the NWP model output with real-time and near-term observations.

Synopsis

An LLM-generated plain-language overview of the weather situation along your route. It summarizes the key findings from the numerical analysis in a concise narrative. This section requires the AI Digest service to be enabled in Settings.

DWD Synoptic Overview

An optional synoptic weather discussion sourced from DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst), providing a broader meteorological context for European flights.

DWD Surface Analysis & Forecast

Surface analysis and short-range forecast charts published by DWD — fronts, pressure centres, isobars across Europe. Shown alongside the synoptic text so you can see the broader pattern around the flight day. Click any chart to enlarge.

GRAMET Cross-Section

A vertical cross-section chart from autorouter.aero showing cloud, wind, temperature, and turbulence along your route. This requires the GRAMET service to be enabled and Autorouter credentials configured in Settings.

Cross-Section Visualization

An interactive canvas-based vertical cross-section built from the NWP model data. Layers are organised into groups (clouds, icing, turbulence, convection, temperature lines, terrain) and you can toggle them individually in the control panel.

  • Four layout modes — cross-section only, compare, side-by-side with the map, or map only — let you arrange the view to taste.
  • The model selector switches between forecast models; the compare layout overlays one layer across all models so you can see where they agree and where they diverge.
  • Switch theme (standard, high-contrast, GRAMET-style) and cloud rendering style (soft, natural puffs, square ForeFlight-like) to match your preference.
  • Hover shows values at the cursor; click pins a point and opens the matching Skew-T sounding below.
  • Multiple icing methods (Ogimet-DD, Ogimet-NWP, SFIP-NWP, IENG, SLD) and cloud methods (DD vs NWP) are available so you can compare how different physical assumptions affect the picture.

Route Graph

A scalar graph below the cross-section, sharing the same x-axis (route distance). Pick any two metrics for the left and right Y-axes — wind speed, ceiling, CAPE, crosswind, temperature, and more. Useful for seeing how a single quantity evolves along the route alongside the vertical layers above.

Route Map

An interactive map showing your route with segments colored by a selectable weather metric (wind, icing risk, cloud cover, humidity, etc.). Use the altitude slider to see how conditions change at different flight levels. Hover over a segment to see the value at that point.

Skew-T Soundings

Skew-T / Log-P diagrams for any point on your route — click a point on the cross-section to load its sounding. Three view modes are available:

  • Dynamic — an interactive canvas Skew-T with a side panel of ~14 variables (CAPE, CIN, lifted index, headwind/crosswind, cloud cover, etc.), overlay bands for cloud / icing / inversion / convective layers, and a linked cursor that highlights the same altitude on the cross-section.
  • Compare — overlays the sounding from every model on a single Skew-T so you can spot where they diverge in temperature, dewpoint, or parcel path.
  • Static — the classic MetPy-rendered PNG with CAPE/CIN shading, a hodograph, and an indices panel.

Sounding Analysis

A table of thermodynamic indices derived from each sounding: CAPE, CIN, lifted index, freezing level, cloud layers, icing zones, and more. Values are shown per-model so you can spot where models agree or diverge.

Model Comparison

A divergence analysis that scores how well the models agree on key variables at each waypoint. High agreement gives confidence in the forecast; poor agreement signals uncertainty.

Info Buttons

Throughout the briefing you'll see small (i) buttons next to metrics and layer names. Clicking one opens a popup explaining what the metric measures, what the thresholds mean, and how to interpret the values in a flying context.

Settings

Flight Profiles

  • Flight Defaults — set default cruise altitude, ceiling, speed, and flight-rules capability for new flights.
  • Forecast Models — choose which NWP models are fetched on each briefing refresh. By default, GFS, ECMWF IFS, and DWD ICON are enabled.
  • Optional Services — enable or disable GRAMET cross-section charts and the AI Digest synopsis.
  • Advisories — configure summary rating aggregation (worst-case vs majority), analysis methods for icing, cloud, and convective advisories, enable/disable individual advisories, and fine-tune thresholds (e.g. icing temperature band, crosswind limits).
  • Advisory Models — select which models are used for advisory evaluation (must be a subset of your enabled forecast models).

Account

  • Language — choose the display language (English, French, German, Spanish).
  • Autorouter Credentials — enter your autorouter.aero username and password for GRAMET charts. Credentials are encrypted at rest.
  • Usage & Costs — view your briefing usage (this week, this month, and total) and per-briefing cost breakdown.

Data Sources & Models

Forecast Models

Flyfun Weather pulls each NWP model from multiple sources and blends them. Where available, raw GRIB2 from the originating forecast centre (ECMWF, DWD, NOAA) provides the high-resolution upper-air sounding and cloud microphysics; outside those coverage areas (or beyond the direct horizon) Open-Meteo fills in. The table below is generated live from the server's source registry, so what you see is exactly what the briefing engine has available right now — including the most recent run, how far it covers, and when the next update is expected.

Full per-metric attribution lives in the Analysis Metrics Reference; the engine-level details are in Weather Engine Specs.

Open the full Data Sources tab → for every column we track (model family, resolution, cycles, latest run, covers until, next update).

Waypoint & Navigation Data

When you enter a waypoint that isn't an airport (a 5-letter fix, a navaid identifier, or a free-route point), Flyfun Weather looks it up in a local navigation database built from four free, public sources. The database is rebuilt on the 28-day AIRAC/NASR cycle and currently contains ~95,900 waypoints after deduplication.

Source Coverage Format Link
Eurocontrol FRA ~8,100 ECAC waypoints (FRA-significant 5LNC + NAVAIDs), per-AIRAC Excel .xlsx eurocontrol.int
OpenNav ~16,000 waypoints across 32 European countries (broader than FRA) HTML scrape opennav.com
OurAirports NAVAIDs ~9,900 worldwide NAVAIDs (VOR/DME/NDB/TACAN/VORTAC) CSV ourairports-data
FAA NASR Fixes ~70,200 US named fixes (intersections, RNAV, reporting points) Zipped CSV faa.gov NASR

All four sources are free, require no authentication, and refresh on the 28-day AIRAC/NASR cycle. When the same identifier appears in multiple sources, the deduplication priority is Eurocontrol FRA → OpenNav → OurAirports → FAA NASR — FRA wins ties because it carries the richest metadata (FIR codes, level availability).

Observations & Other Sources

Data Provider Notes
METAR / TAF NOAA Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov API) Primary source for live observations and terminal forecasts. For a manual cross-check (especially in Europe), see Ogimet.
GRAMET cross-section autorouter.aero Requires you to connect your personal autorouter account in Settings. The GRAMET image is fetched on your behalf using your credentials.
DWD synoptic discussion Deutscher Wetterdienst (opendata.dwd.de) Short-range and medium-range synoptic text bulletins for European weather context.
NWS Area Forecast Discussion NOAA / NWS (aviationweather.gov, api.weather.gov) Local forecaster discussions from the relevant NWS office, used when the route includes US airports.
AI synopsis & translations Anthropic Claude Plain-language briefing summary and DWD German-to-English translation. Optional — toggle in Settings.

Getting Access

Flyfun Weather is currently in early preview. To request access, sign in and wait for an email confirmation that your account has been enabled.

Feedback

To suggest improvements, report bugs, or give any feedback, please create an issue on GitHub.

Disclaimer

Flyfun Weather is an experimental, non-certified tool for educational and planning purposes. It is not a substitute for official weather briefings from your national aviation authority. Always cross-check with official sources (METARs, TAFs, SIGMETs, AIRMETs) before flying.

This application was built with AI assistance (Claude, Anthropic).

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Data Sources & Models — full table

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