this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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ShowerThoughts
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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
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Aviator here: I want to see the prog charts and the goddamn GOES imagery. Get this computer-generated Accu-Weather What Are You Doing Step-Meteorologist monkey wank out of my goddamn standard briefing.
As a non-aviator, I don't know what any of that shit is. As the son of an aviator (my father had a pilot's license when he was younger, but he didn't keep it as I guess you have to fly so many hours a year to keep it), I want to help you, but I'm not sure I can.
I was given this link a few years back, and I've kept it, though I rarely check it. I just did, site is still up. Is this closer to what you want? https://www.ventusky.com/ If not, sorry; again, I don't know what all that means, but someone said it was a different/better kind of weather app/site.
Prog charts, or prognostic charts, are these:
Large scale picture of what the weather is doing including the positions of pressure systems, fronts etc. You've probably seen some of the symbology used on television weather reports. Prog charts are often prepared as observations and as forecasts.
Geostationary Orbital Environmental Satellites are a series of weather satellites operated by the United States that sit up there in geosynchronous orbit and take pictures of the Earth's atmosphere at various wavelengths, providing up to date gods-eye view of the weather a hemisphere at a time.
When I went to flight school, a lot of weather data, both observations and forecasts, were delivered to pilots in a heavily abbreviated text format intended to be distributed by Morse code or teletype. Pilots would get these products either through a Direct User Access Terminal System, or have them read to them during a briefing from a Flight Service Station. Here in the age of the internet, a lot of that has been replaced with internet-based graphical data, and they want to mix things together in strange ways, while making it more difficult to access raw data like GOES images and dopplar radar images.