Weather hazards and forecasts

The course, which is free to AOPA members, contains eight short lessons and is just over an hour in length. I recently took the course and appreciate how charts, interactive maps, and radar are displayed and annotated on the screen while the narrators are describing various weather tools and preflight briefing flows. This presentation style makes it easy to follow along, and each lesson also includes a full transcript of the narration for quick review of a topic.

The Graphical Forecast for Aviation lesson is a concise review of the many tools available to us for free on the Aviation Weather Center’s GFA interactive map—many of which we may not have known existed or forgotten about.

The Weather Radar lesson describes how radar works in a way that is easy to understand. The Radar Reflectivity: Base vs. Composite lesson builds on the basic radar lesson. If you’ve ever wondered what Radar (Lowest Tilt) means on your EFB, this thoroughly explains it in six minutes.

The Thunderstorms lesson contains great reminders about how unwise it is to flirt with these monsters, but also provides practical tips on how to avoid accidentally putting yourself in a situation that could be dangerous for you and your aircraft.

If you use ForeFlight as an EFB, you’ll appreciate the ForeFlight Focus: Weather Imagery, and Turbulence and Icing Forecast Products lessons. These lessons explain how the charts on the ForeFlight Imagery tab are organized in a fashion intended to help a pilot more effectively brief a flight, and provide an overview of each ForeFlight weather product.

Finally, the Datalink Weather lesson offers valuable insights into how this information is transmitted to your airplane when you are flying, and how to most effectively use the information once you see it.

The Weather Hazards and Forecasts course can be accessed by going to the website. You’ll need to be logged into your aopa.org account to gain free access to the course.

sportys.com/wxcourse