Gliding forecasts have come a long way in the last few years with Regional Atmospheric Soaring Predictions (RASP) being made available.  RASP is the brain child of Dr. John W. (Jack) Glendening, a Meteorologist in the US.  Dr Jack has made his RASP program freely available to other regions around the world to post-process files output by "equations of motion" meteorological models run by the U.S. Weather Bureau and the U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Thanks to sponsorship from Internode and the GFA, the RASP processing of the models and subsequent forecasts are available in Australia.  The Australian RASP is available at the AusRASP web site: http://glidingforecast.on.net/RASP/RASPtable.html where you can use the viewer to page through forecast images related to Thermals, Cloud, Winds and Wave data for each state and for hourly time periods.  It also gives you some information about each type of image to help you interpret what you're seeing.

I'm sure many of you review an Area forecast (ARFOR) and Terminal Area Forecasts (TAF) for the area and aerodrome(s) you're planning to depart from and possibly overfly on a cross country gliding flight, these are good weather forecasts and are important for planning, but they don't provide much in the way of soaring data.  RASP is a great source of gliding forecast information that can be easily and quickly interpreted.