Unfortunately, obtaining a weather briefing for a flight to an airport over the horizon can be more a mechanical process than an effort to really understand what the atmosphere is up to and how it's likely to affect the planned flight. A new pilot should try to take two complementary approaches to learning about weather. The first is the "big picture" approach of getting in touch with nature. Meteorology is very much a hard science, but even those who make it their careers are often left speechless by the sheer power of a thunderstorm. The second approach is an extremely practical one - learning how the current or forecast weather is likely to affect your plans to fly. You can begin this approach by trying to figure out whether the weather is likely to cancel tomorrow's flying lesson. (You should practice this technique even on days when you don't have a lesson scheduled.)
Flying takes you into a new environment - the sky - a world that is much different from the earth-bound surroundings you are used to. Understanding and appreciating this new environment requires understanding the weather. When you think about it, the most unusual aspect of this new environment is that it's invisible. Yet the invisible air manages to hold up your aircraft when you are aloft.
Even when you feel the air as wind, it's far from solid like the ground under your feet or the road under the tires of your car. If your car hits a bump, you can stop and walk back to examine the hole or ridge in the road that is responsible. If you experience turbulence, you'll never be able to find and examine the moving air that caused it, unless your airplane happens to be equipped with the same sophisticated devices that scientists use to study turbulence. Even then you won't be able to "see" the air in the usual sense, only abstract images that represent the air and its movements.
Soon after beginning flying lessons, you'll learn enough about aerodynamics to understand how invisible air keeps your aircraft in the sky. When you master making an aircraft turn, climb, and descend, you are really learning how to manipulate the forces created by the interactions of the aircraft and the air.
Not only does invisible air hold aircraft up and make it possible to control them, it also moves, taking the aircraft along with it. Some of your most challenging early flying lessons will be devoted to ground reference maneuvers where you try to do things that would appear simple to someone who isn't familiar with the fluid environment of the sky, such as flying in a circle around a point on the ground, making "S" turns above a road, or even flying exactly parallel to a runway you plan to land on. Your flight instructor will pick a day when the wind is blowing for you to practice these maneuvers because the idea is to learn how to handle being pushed around by the air.
Later you will learn how to navigate; that is, how to go from one airport to another without getting lost. While drivers or hikers can find many ways to get lost on the ground, these ways never include the ground or the road moving to carry them in an unexpected direction. A pilot, on the other hand, can easily become lost by not paying close attention to which way and how fast the wind is pushing the airplane off the intended course. A great deal of what you'll have to master in the navigation part of your flying studies consists of learning how to go where you want to go, not where the wind wants you to go.
A good way to begin appreciating both the getting-in-touch-with-nature aspects of weather and its practical side is by taking some time before your next flight to find out what the winds are likely to be doing. Instead of just getting the forecast, look a little deeper by learning what makes the winds blow and then by looking at maps of the actual and forecast weather - the maps on television news or The Weather Channel are good starting points.
Differences in air pressure cause the winds to blow, which means that working to understand air pressure is a good place to begin learning about weather. Air pressure is important to pilots for other reasons. As you go higher in the atmosphere, the pressure decreases. This decrease in pressure is why any airplane can fly only so high and why, even if the airplane can go very high, the people in it need to be in a pressurized cabin (as in an airliner) or to use oxygen masks. Altimeters, the instruments that indicate how high an aircraft is, are based on the decrease of air pressure with altitude. Textbooks used in pilot training courses are a good place to learn about air pressure and weather basics, as long as they go beyond the "here are the answers to FAA questions" genre.
The wind is important, both as a part of the large-scale weather picture and in very practical ways because of its immediate effects on airplanes, but also because it directly affects other aspects of the weather. Before taking off or landing, a pilot needs to assess the effects of the wind's direction and speed. Is the wind blowing across the runway (a crosswind) too fast for a safe takeoff or landing? A pilot also needs to know how the wind is going to affect navigation once the airplane is on its way.
Once these questions are answered, a pilot needs to assess how the wind is likely to affect weather en route and at a planned destination. If the wind is blowing from a cold part of the Earth, it's going to bring cool or cold weather. Even more important for pilots, winds from over warm oceans bring humid air, and the humidity can supply the moisture needed for clouds, fog, thunderstorms, or snow.
Except for strong winds when the sky is clear, almost all of the weather problems that pilots face arise from the actions of water in the atmosphere. Without water in the atmosphere, pilots wouldn't have to worry about poor visibility - except in dust storms - and precipitation in all of its forms, including thunderstorms, snowstorms, or hurricanes. It's obvious that all pilots should learn as much as possible about how water acts in the atmosphere. Not only will such knowledge help you to avoid dangerous weather, it will also help you get into closer touch with nature by being able to answer such apparently simple questions as, "Why are today's clouds puffy while yesterday's were flat?"
As you go into the sky and learn more about weather you should become a sky watcher. Any time you go inside where you can't see the sky you should be able to answer the question: "What did the sky look like before I came in?" You'll be amazed at how much you can learn just by watching the sky and comparing what you see with weather reports and forecasts. Comparing the clouds you see out your window with weather satellite images you call up on your computer ( www.aopa.org/members/wx ) is fascinating. The part of the sky you can see represents only a small part of large-scale weather patterns. Satellite images give you the big picture.
You can learn the basic science of weather, which you will need to make sense of preflight weather briefings, by following the logical order of a textbook. Or, you can learn by finding the answers to questions that arise as you watch the weather, trying to figure out how it will affect your flying. For in-stance, thick fog that grounds a planned lesson could lead to understanding the various concepts related to moisture in the atmosphere, such as dew point and relative humidity and how they are related to the various ways that fog forms.
The more you learn about weather, the more comfortable you'll feel when you fly. Understanding the atmosphere will make it possible for you to launch confidently on dream trips far from home after you no longer have your flight instructor to make the go/no-go decision for you.
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