Chris Galli writes:

We hear you John. And we hear everyone else who has chimed in as
this soaring season is starting to heat up here in North America. Thanks for the
feedback and criticism. It's the relentless demand for newer and better data and
visualization techniques that keeps this project moving forward (albeit, a
little slow at times).

The NAM 12km model run will be brought back to life in current version of XC
Skies for the next week until the new version of XC Skies is released. You
should start seeing it over the next hour. We knowingly let that drop on the
floor because the new XC Skies (V3) was to be released by March 15. It got
pushed back a couple of weeks. So in short: "Yeah, we kinda blew that one, and
we apologize."

Within the next 10 days you can expect to have more soaring information in one
place than has ever been previously available. The model run down looks like
this:

HRRR 3km native sigma levels (yes, for those who understand what that means, you
read that right) for all 18 hours run every 6 hours. This is a tremendous amount
of information for the U.S. NAM 12km (the one we let drop as you noted) hourly
through 36 hours and then 3 hourly through 84 hours. NAM 3km is available as of
last week running for CONUS on the exact same grid as HRRR 3km. All available
hours are in XC Skies V3. RAP 13km for all hourly forecasts run every 6 hours.
GFS .25 degrees, hourly for 5 days. GFDS Global Canadian model at .25 degrees, 3
hourly for 48 hours, then 6 hourly through 4 days.

* all of these models are still parameterized to 1km resolution.

A few nice features:

1. A single mouse click on the map will instantly show all underlying values of
the map overlay for ALL available models at the particular hour and location.

2. Click anywhere on the map to start a route for any model available.

3. Click anywhere on the map to view a point forecast for any model out through
all available data. In the case of GFS, that's 5 days of hourly data available
via an interactive plot within a second or so.

4. Click anywhere on the map to view interactive simple SkewT plots and
Hodographs of any location for any model. You can even animate multiple days of
SkewT plots to see the detailed evolution of the soaring window at hourly steps.

5. Animated winds for any wind level and surface winds.

6. Wind streamlines.

7. Custom coloring, thresholding and masking of values for any layer. This is
useful to pull out the underlying values within sensitive areas and quite a bit
more, but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.

Other improvements:

1. Speed, speed speed. The entire weather engine was rewritten from the ground
up, and you will notice the difference immediately.

2. Fully functional on any recent mobile device. That means smart phones,
tablets, iPad, etc. iPhone 4+ and Android 3.2+

Coming soon, but not in this first V3 release:

1. Create your own custom layer that will find the intersection of conditions
that you are interested in. This is to replace the "XC Potential" layer that
we've always cringed a little every time it's mentioned for the obvious reasons.

2. Share what you're seeing with friends via Facebook or Twitter with just a few
clicks.

3. Airports overlay and geographical features of interest (peak names, passes,
etc.); the markers that many of us pilots fly by...

Well, you get the gist of what's coming. Below is a screen shot of the main map.
We're keeping the similar look and feels of XC Skies through this first release
to make sure we can transition folks to the new tools without too much of a
learning curve.

There's only a handful of bugs to sort out on our list and then you'll have full
access to this new version. Same cost. No gimmicks. No advertising clutter etc.
Just more useful data for our community. I don't know anything about Sky Sight,
but more resources to compare a day's soaring potential sounds great to us!

Thanks to John Godfrey and Ron Gleason.