How is 8Flight Weather Different?

By relying on our own meteorology and big-data expertise and not outsourcing weather data to companies serving hundreds of different industries, 8Flight is able to focus exclusively on aviation weather and the information that's most important to pilots.

8Flight starts with the basics like METARs and TAFs and provides better visualizations of the information you're already used to. METARs (and TAFs -- right on the map) provide full details, including visibility, cloud cover, precise cloud layers / ceiling, and weather conditions, all in one glance without toggling 10 different layers to see each piece of information individually.

And because even weather cameras are analyzed and color coded based on conditions, they're presented in the same layer too when relevant. Everything is decluttered based on how relevant each piece of information is (representative of the area around it, differs dramatically from other weather, etc) instead of based on the size of an airport or how things just happen to fit on the screen. Instead 8Flight makes literally thousands of pieces of weather information accessible in one glance.

Then we add data that most pilots never knew existed. Like live ASOS data instead of just the hour-old METAR. Or other state and DOT weather stations when they provide relevant wind or visibility measurements in areas with limited weather reporting (or mountain passes for instance). And the best available data is displayed on the map or used in runway winds calculations. We also provide D-ATIS at airports where that's available.

Our offline flight planning engine even lets you plan flights in-flight without connectivity or instantly view a Skew-T anywhere, even offline.

And hourly meteograms can be accessed by tapping and holding on the map anywhere in the world, with 14-days of clouds, freezing level, and weather conditions.

But it's just important to know what the weather's going to be doing in 15 minutes or an hour or 3 hours or 6 days. For that 8Flight lets you overlay global forecasts right on the map, hourly to 7-days (3-hourly for days 6 & 7). And we process everything in-house to maximize relevance, using raw weather model outputs, including from the HRRR model in the CONUS and Alaska for 20x better icing, turbulence (CONUS-only), and cloud forecasts than you'll find elsewhere.

Forecast radar shows you where precipitation will be, what kind, how intense, and relevant echo top heights.

Cloud forecasts show you exactly where clouds will be, every 500-1000 ft, up to 7 days in advance with 20x more precision than you'll find anywhere else -- you can often almost make out individual clouds.

Color-coded 7-day winds / temps forecasts let you see in one glance what winds at every 500-1000 ft altitude will be doing, as well as where temperatures are below freezing (blue) or above ISA+15 (orange).

20x higher resolution icing & turbulence forecasts are available for a selection of altitudes hourly out to 48-hours (3-hourly beyond 18 hours, soon 7-days and every 1000ft).

For decades pilots have been told NEXRAD data is delayed by 15 minutes or more. That's not really true.

NEXRAD radars scan the atmosphere repeatedly at different elevation angles to provide a complete 3D picture of the weather so that meteorologists can understand the internal 3D structure of a storm. In active precipitation modes, 14 different elevation angles might be scanned. Each 360 degree sweep takes about 20 seconds, so a complete 3D volume scan takes about 4.5 minutes.

Other nationwide mosaics of composite radar data are built every few minutes from all of the most recent complete volume scans from each radar site. So the newest volume scan from a given site could be nearly 4.5 minutes old, and the oldest data in a given scan might be 9 minutes old or more. Then they spend a couple minutes combining all of that data from every site across the country into one mosaic and sending it to an app (or even a couple minutes more to send it via SiriusXM or ADS-B). So it's true that the information there is quite old.

But the raw radar data from each site is available in realtime, every 60 degrees of sweep. So we receive data from each site every 3-4 seconds with <1 second of latency. And pilots care much more about the 2D location of precipitation echos for avoidance than the internal 3D structure of the storm, and most of that information is contained in the lowest couple elevation sweeps. In fact, meteorologists do too for tracking storms and issuing severe weather warnings, so in the course of scanning those 14 different elevation angles, the radar will actually return to the lowest tilt up to 3 times before the completion of that volume scan so that the lowest tilt is updated every 1-2 minutes. And overlapping coverage between sites means that a given storm will typically be scanned even more frequently than that.

So instead of taking the easy route of waiting for an entire volume scan to complete and periodically constructing a nationwide mosaic from each of those, we use a proprietary processing technique that enables us to construct a mosaic in the app from each radar site's individual updates. That results in updates about every 30 seconds with data that's 30 seconds to a minute old at most.

And because we can account for the time of each piece of data in the mosaic, we can do things like depicting a gray degraded-coverage area for sites that the app hasn't received fresh data from in more than a couple minutes. So there's no chance that some included data might be much older while you're looking at a newer timestamp.

Other apps also simplify the data that they do display in order to save Internet bandwidth, sometimes to the point that isolated cells are removed altogether, but in every case removing important detail that provides insight into the behavior of storms (shape, rotation, gradients, etc), as well as radar performance (spurious returns, coverage blocked by terrain or interference). 8Flight instead provides up to 50x higher resolution while maintaining each radar's native radial coordinate system so you can tell exactly what's going on. We also depict more accurate and detailed echo top labels.

Of course none of this means NEXRAD is now a replacement for onboard radar or should be used that way. If nothing else, there are plenty of areas (particularly in the western US) that have poor or no NEXRAD coverage, and a given NEXRAD site is probably more likely to fail even momentarily than an onboard radar (or without the redundancy of NEXRAD if the onboard had failed). And the same level of live data simply isn't available in the rest of the world for instance. But it's incredibly more useful to make decisions based on precise seconds-old data than a rough sketch of where the weather was 15 minutes ago. And with a $5/mo Starlink connection, it's much more affordable than the alternatives in flight too.