Episode 143- Matt Scutter and SkySight Soaring 101

Matt Scutter is an Australian competition sailplane pilot and software engineer who leads a team that runs the popular global soaring forecast platform Skysight. Unlike other platforms that use existing weather models to produce interactive forecasts for free flight enthusiasts like Meteoparapente and XCSkies, SkySight uses their own supercomputing systems to gather a wide range of weather data to create their own daily models. Initially designed for sailplane forecasting SkySight is now a go-to platform for paragliding and hang gliding forecasting as well.

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Episode 120- Lisa Verzella and Understanding XCSkies and Weather Forecasting

Lisa Verzella flew hang gliders for over 20 years (many of those competitively), has been flying paragliders also for over 20 years and is a professional meteorologist based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She competed on the US World’s team in 1998 and 2008 in hang gliding. This show is in two parts. The first is our typical audio podcast that goes into Lisa’s vast and fascinating history of chasing airtime, and the second is a video tutorial of a deep dive into XCSkies and Lisa’s full weather flow (ie all the stuff she uses before she gets to XCSkies to identify good days to go flying).

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Bonus Episode! Weather Episode #3 with Gavin Morris

Nik Hawks sits down with Australian meteorologist, channel 9 weatherman and paragliding pilot Gavin Morris to talk all things weather, forecasting and identifying good days in this 3rd and final bonus episode in our weather series. Gavin started his weather studies as a surfer in the 80’s then moved into reporting for snow and surf forecasts and is now who many Australians see on TV every day to get their daily weather. Gavin says we can think of ourselves as weather balloons as we soar up through the atmosphere.

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Bonus Episode! Weather Series Episode 1 with Emi Carvalho

This is the first of three shows in a bonus series for our subscribers dedicated to building an understanding of the weather and forecasting. Emi Carvalho studied physics in school, but it wasn’t until he began paragliding that applied physics interested him.  He talks about the basics of weather, focusing on island weather and the possibilities inherent in an island with mountains over 2,000m.  Emi talks about where he turns to first for weather (Windy and any local knowledge), and what he usually looks for (wind intensity, direction, and temps at different altitudes.).

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