Weather science
Weather science for paraglider pilots
Analyses of real flying days in Switzerland and guides to our data — recalculated against measurements and models, with the method disclosed. Not a textbook, but what is measurable.
Foehn and paragliding: why 4 hPa is not enough and what 20 foehn valleys measured
Foehn is a warm and above all dry downslope wind on the side of a mountain range that faces away from the flow. It forms wherever strong winds blow across a mountain chain, and it often reaches storm force [[1]](https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/wetter/wetter-und-klima-von-a-bis-z/foehn.html). On the north side of the Alps it is called south foehn, after the direction it comes from. On the south side of the Alps it is called north foehn. With south foehn, air pressure is higher south of the Alps than north of them, and the air flows across the Alps towards the north. With north foehn it is the other way round. Where the high and low pressure systems sit varies from one situation to the next [[1]](https://www.meteoschweiz.admin.ch/wetter/wetter-und-klima-von-a-bis-z/foehn.html).
30 min read · updated 2026-10-11
Flight weather in your AI chat: connecting Wingcast to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini
The Wingcast app answers one question well: where does it work this week. What it cannot answer is your question. "What can I reach from Bern tomorrow within 45 minutes of driving, if I leave out the strong gusts?" Questions like that are personal, and adding a slider for every one of them produces a cockpit, not an app.
9 min read · updated 2026-09-27
Dust devils in paragliding: how to spot a dusty day
Every textbook contains the same paragraph on dust devils: hot ground, rising air, angular momentum, done. What is missing are numbers for Switzerland.
38 min read · updated 2026-09-18
Gust front of 30 July 2026: what the model said — and what was measured
A great deal gets written about gust fronts. What is missing are numbers for one concrete day. This article takes a real event — 30 July 2026 in Switzerland — and analyses it twice: once from the forecast we work with every day, and once from real station measurements. The two analyses do not say the same thing, and that is precisely the interesting part.
25 min read · updated 2026-08-03