June 6: drone weather forecasts in Spain

In May, it rained a lot compared to historical records.

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Okay, let’s continue. I shall try to write an update every few days for you and include some interesting new images. The plan to do short flight videos with a bit of explanation has suffered a small delay because I have discovered the DJI Pro controller, while very useful in many respects, doesn’t record system sounds, so I will find some way around that for us.

It has been raining a lot in this part of Spain for the past month or so. The images in today’s video are of the same drought-affected reservoir as last week but after a few weeks of rain. Wonderful what a bit of water can do, especially if you catch the light at the right time. There is a traditional phrase in Spanish that goes something like “If in March it’s like May, then in May it’s like March”, meaning that if you have a dry March, you’ll get a wet May. That has certainly been the case this year. The regional weather service, AEMET Murcia, even tweeted today that it rained so much last month that it was the wettest May on record, for at least the past 83 years.

So much rain meant fewer flying days but it was interesting to see how the different weather forecast apps performed. UAV Forecast is very nice and easy to use for many things, but it missed a huge storm for me at the very end of April (see video below). I just about had time to pack up before the skies opened up. Unsurprisingly, it seems like the best thing to use in Spain is the official national weather service, AEMET, which has a range of options for you as a drone pilot.

There is the standard forecast page, which can be broken down by region, province or the larger towns, over the next seven days or in more detail over the next 36 hours. There are also some open-access forecast models for rain or wind and some observational radar, satellite or lightning strike results where you can see what has been happening for the last few hours, with nice animated playback features. If you are a licenced drone pilot, though, you have access to more on AEMET’s aeronautical forecast service, AMA.

AMA is Spain’s professional weather service for aviation users, and you get access to the ful range of specific technical data from airports around the country for flight planning and thinking ahead: GAMET, (low level, general aviation meteorological forecast), AIRMET (airman’s meteorological ), METAR (meteorological aerodrome reports), TAF (terminal aerodrome forecasts), SPECI (special weather report), SIGMET (significant meteorological hazards) and other aerodrome weather warnings. You’ll have to learn how to read them, though, because they look like this:

METARLEMI 061500Z 12011KT 080V150 CAVOK 24/15 Q1015

TAFLEMI 061100Z 0612/0712 11010KT 9999 FEW025 TX26/0613ZTN17/0706Z BECMG 0621/0623 05006KT PROB30 TEMPO 0622/0704BKN010

There are also more visual and, for drone pilots, more useful items in other sections, including rain, lightning strike and “wind at 10m” forecasts for the next 36 hours. Here, for example, is AMA’s visual representation of accumulated rainfall in the previous 12 hours through to tomorrow, June 7, 13:00 UTC (15:00 Spanish time). If this is right, central Spain is going to get wet on Wednesday:

So, if you’re flying drones in Spain, check out the AEMET weather pages before relying on the international apps. Then you can try and do flights just after the rain and get nice images like this with lots of interesting clouds in the sky:

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