Hi
there, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Cloudbase Mayhem. I've got a great show for you today with Matt Scudder. He is the brainchild behind SkySight, the soaring platform, kind of like Meteo, Parapente, or XCSkies. The difference, the big difference there with their platform is they're pulling in all the data from all the models, but they're creating their own model. And Matt is a sailplane pilot by trade, and a racing pilot, flies a lot of comps. He's also recently taken up paragliding, but they built this platform for sailplanes and specifically for racing, and then realized they were really on to something for the free flight world. So they have, they took some time and reworked it and made it work for paragliders, hang gliders, whatever you you fly.
I got interested in SkySight in the last race because Revis, my, one of my supporters and weather guru and really talented pilot started using it because he uses everything when it comes to weather and, and forecasting and gathering data. He's really into that and he's a software engineer and he really likes it. And so I, I, I haven't used it much myself, but I wanted to learn more about it. So I reached out to Matt and talked to him about SkySight. And this is another kind of like we did with Lisa and XCSkies. There's a very short opening here where Matt talks a little bit about his history and why they built this and how SkySight came to be.
And then we're going to switch over. So go to the show notes on the website, cloudbaseman.com, Click on this episode, and the show notes will have the YouTube video we did—basically the screen capture of him explaining SkySite. And if you want to get it, if you're familiar with it, you probably... this is a lot of detail that you probably aren't familiar with. This will give you a lot more to it, like how to fly it, fly convergence lines, and how to use it to predict flying the best route from A to B. And it's a really powerful platform, and it's getting more and more powerful all the time. They've got a great team there. So you'll learn a lot from this video, even if you already use it, if you haven't used it and you're curious after listening to this and you want to get it, uh, go to sky site and go to the, and use the code Cloudbase Mayhem to get 14 days extra free.
So a little bit of incentive there to, uh, play around and get used used to it before you dive in and commit to getting a subscription. So again, go to the website, click on the show notes, and you'll see all that. We'll give you a reminder at the end of the of the quick little audio show here with Matt. This is very short, and then you'll switch over and watch the video. A huge shout out to all the contributors to the book we've sent out. We had about 20 advanced copies of Advanced Paragliding that went out to a bunch of the folks who who contributed a lot to the book, or had a full chapter in their contributed pictures, and that kind of thing. So I've been seeing these great pictures of, of all of you with the book on social media, Nick Greece and Bill Belcourt and Rafael Saladini and Russ Ogden and Cody and Jeff Shapiro and all my heroes.
So that's been really special to see. Chrigel, of course, I think he was the, he got the first advanced copy. That was a real, that was a big surprise to see him holding in the book on Instagram. So thank you all for doing that. It means so much to me. And speaking to Nick Greece, who contributed a bunch of great images to the book, he has a new cooking show. I give him a shout out. He has a new cooking show on kavu.com, K-A-V-U.com, a company he's been with for many, many years. And the cooking show is a blast. It's really well done, super fun. And if if you've got some time and you're into food, go check it out. It's a lot of fun. So thank you all for promoting the book and backing it and giving me so much of your time. And hopefully all of you who ordered advanced copies, you'll be getting it very soon.
I understand it's on the way. So thanks for your patience and I hope you enjoy the book. Top of the show tip is another little segment we've pulled out of the longer interview that Nick did recently with our friend Kevin Kevin Brooker, sailplane pilot. He had the top of the show tip on the last one as well. We're just going to keep pulling these out of this interview. We'll do a longer one with him that talks all about this, but this one is on, Nick asked him a question about how do you approach a task or a day or something that's really beyond your current skill level without exposing yourself to more And I really like this answer that Kevin provided. So enjoy this little quick segment, and then we'll jump into the show with Matt.
And then if you're on a laptop or something, then switch over and watch the very informative screen share and video tutorial of how to use SkySight. Cheers. Cheers. Assessing a site or a day or a specific move can sometimes require a ton of experience we don't have. What are great ways to get pieces of that experience or the totality of that experience without exposing ourselves to unnecessary hazard? I think a lot of that is breaking the task down into sections and, you know, whatever the task is. And a lot of it's flying on, I'm
a firm believer in flying on really crummy, soft days because you learn a lot about staying in the air. And, you know, the first rule of cross country is stay in the air. And, um, the second rule is revisit rule number one, you know? And, um, so, you know, I think a lot of it is, you know, when you start to feel slightly, always give yourself an out, you know, like never put put yourself in a situation where this better work. Um, that's such a coin flip and so many people get caught with it and it's not really a comfortable place to go. And if you did put yourself there, be honest with yourself and say, I got lucky today. It wasn't skill that got me out. It was luck. And we're going to learn a lot about being in that kind of like dumb ass
situation, you know, and realize when you're encroaching on that and, you know, it's okay okay to be nervous. Uh, that's, that's the way we learn. And, you know, by breaking the task down into smaller pieces, it's just, I'm going to go to here. And then as your comfort level, how did it work out? Is your comfort level there with the decisions I made? Good. Does everything ahead look good? And then, you know, go a little farther. And we were talking about flying small triangles or, you know, small tasks around the landing zone. And it's a good way to, you know, fly in marginal days or big days. Cause you know, you have, you're going into an area, a landing area that you're familiar with, which is so important, you know, that you're not adding
another variable.
Matt, great to have you on the show. I've been wanting to reach out to you and your team for, for quite a long time. We had this, we had this really fun show with, with Lisa about XCSkies, and it got a ton of great feedback on that. I think it was very valuable to our community and And my own X-Alps team was really using your site a ton in the last race, in the 2019 race. And I know it's become more and more of a favorite. So I appreciate you coming on the show and telling us all about it. And tell me about you guys. How did this happen? Why did it happen? What was kind of the catalyst?
Yeah, so I've been gliding mostly in sailplanes since about 2009. And I quickly got into the competitive scene, got on the national team, got on the world's team. And I was coming up to the then junior world championships in 2015 in Narrowline, New South Wales. And I was on the team. I had the right glider. I had some great teammates, but the thing we were really lacking is weather. We had access to a couple of sites, a few local rasps, that kind of thing, But there was no really good solution for detailed weather in the area we're going to be flying in, and so I started having a team for a round. I played around with grasps and things like that in the past. At the time, I was a software engineer at Google in Sydney, and so I knew my way around computers and all that kind of thing, and did a whole lot of homework, did a whole lot of study, and
tried to put together something that I thought would be useful for our team and, um, it clearly it was useful because I went on to win the world championships that year and, um, about a year later at work, I was still, I was a bit quite bored at work and thought maybe I'd have another look at this and see if I could put some more time into it and spin it out to something that was not useful just to people on the team. but maybe useful to everyone. And so, a couple more years of work and I released the product you now know as sky side, and so it's myself and a team about four developers because I work with quite quickly to original meteorologists. And, yeah, we're just working on making it better. We've, in the last couple of years, really expanded our focus not just to sailplanes. So I learned to sailplanes. I've since gone solo on paragliders as well.
But we're trying to make it as friendly as possible to paraglider pilots and hang glider pilots and eventually even general aviation pilots as well, just trying to deliver detailed forecasts that are super easy to use that don't need a meteorologist to interpret. and
What models do you feed into it? What models are you working from, so...
It depends on the region, so we initialize—so we run on our own modeling—and but we initialize those models either from base of GFS or ICON, and potentially as well as CMWF in the future. And then we do our own data simulation on top of that, so we don't just rely on those sources. As well, we ingest satellites ourselves, we've got all the ground stations, all the meteorological observations ourselves. Because often the GFS update comes out at midnight or 6am or something, then you want the forecast at 10am, so there's been four hours of new data that's just gone to waste. So we're able to do that data assimilation to actually pull and then overwrite that initial data from GFS to ICON or something like that, with the real latest data before we run our model in. and then we're running a very high detailed
variant of model you might have heard called Morph WRX, so we've forked that and made a whole bunch of changes to try and optimize it for gliding in particular, so trying to better resolve the boundary layer and the phenomena that matter to us. And yeah, we run that in as much detail as possible, as often as possible, and present the results in SkySoft.
I know that, and I am not a meteorologist, I'll put that out at the top of the show But I know that from friends of mine who are like Nick Neynens and Hansa Ridgemanic, people that are, you know, very versed in meteorology, that they often talk about that really the models are not operating very well in the layers that we're really concerned with in soaring. Maybe a bit more with sailplanes because you guys can obviously use wave and a lot more speed and get taller at times when there's wave. But I'm just wondering how much interpretation, interpolation is required to make what we see in Skysight accurate.
No, you're absolutely right. So most weather models don't run enough layers. So people talk about horizontal grid resolutions. They say, oh, this weather model is eight kilometers and this one's four kilometers. And that is very important to think about in the mountains and things like that. So, what the distance between those forecast points are is whether it's going to resolve the valleys and the peaks and things like that. And, but it's also very important, the vertical layers, and you hear almost no one talking about that at all. So, within the sky side, we run almost twice as many vertical layers than other people do. And so we have a whole bunch of extra layers in the boundary layer, trying to really resolve both the thermals near the surface of the ground, how they're forming particularly through the hills, and then also as you're getting up near the top, the boundary layer, the top of the thermals. And so we can actually resolve with the height. It's so a weather model like GFS—um, I've just clarified, making these numbers up, I don't know the exact where they put the layers, but they might have, say, a kilometer between the layers at a higher altitude, and which means it can't really tell you if the cloud base is going to be at 10,000 feet or 13,000 feet with any great degree of detail.
So, if we're able to slice in two more layers in that space, and a layer with 300 meters, then we can really give it a lot more detail about, about where we think the clouds are going to be forming within that area, or if the clouds are going to be forming at all. So we do the same over the atmosphere that we think gliders are going to be flying to try and get these better results.
And is this all then computer-driven? I mean, can you be – I imagine this started in Australia and you were working to get a better picture of what was going on there for your own needs. And as this expanded, I know it's something that's been quite accurate. For us in the Rockies, you know, here in the states, um, but in again, in my limited knowledge of meteorology, you know, when we, when I travel and go to different places, you know, when I'm in Europe, we, we still look at, say, something like XCSkies, but because Chris isn't using a lot of those models, it's more GFS there. Um, you know, we're using things like Medio Parapente more, or maybe, maybe even now SkySight more.
How do you, I would just imagine it gets really expensive to start. I mean, do you feel like SkySight is something that can cover the world really accurately or is it really, does it take a lot of personal bandwidth from your team to kind of dial in an area or is it all just computers? You can just grab it and go.
Yeah, so it's extraordinarily expensive for us to run the models we do. So we try and run our models in all the regions we forecast for. we're not falling back to GFS or anything like that. So you're seeing roughly the same level of detail in every region we forecast for. In some regions where there's a few less pilots or the topography is simpler, we run a little bit lower detail. But all through, say, Europe, the US, and all through the east coast of Australia, we're running really high detailed forecasts. And yeah, it costs an extraordinary amount to do that. So we have about 2,000 CPUs forecasting the weather right now, and it's more or less the same model we're running in every region, so physics is the same everywhere in the world. So if it was, say, either the model needs to be tuned by this country or that country, or the thermals are different here, but I think physics is more or less the same everywhere.
So we really only make very small tweaks from region to region and run the same model in every location is
This a standalone business now? Is this what you're doing? Is it, uh, you're bringing in, you have enough subscribers that it pays for to to work from a living, yeah?
I quit my job at Google, uh, after just six months of running sky stuff. It was immediately quite popular. Congratulations,
that's fantastic the
Last few years, the growth in Europe has been incredible, so I think we're one of the bigger providers now. That's
Fantastic, wow, and I, I guess, do you just credit that success to the simplicity of, you know, that a layman can get in there and figure out a good day? And that's what we're going to do with you here shortly. I know you're going to take us over and take us into the program. Those of you who are listening to this audio side, we will be switching over and just watching Matt use SkySight. And so that'll be a lot of fun. But what do you credit that success to? like obviously the accuracy of of the forecast but is it it must just be the platform yeah
I think I always held in mind things like Google Earth. Like, do you remember the first time you used Google Earth and it was just like so much fun to play with, like zoom in and see your house? And like, it was just a whole new paradigm. So I was always trying to build an experience that was like that, that even if you weren't actually interested in the weather today, it was still fun to have a look and see how the day's unfolding, see how the front's coming through, how that's influencing weather, and just trying to push the boundaries a little bit in that area, trying to make it as easy to use as possible. The focus was always that we weren't going to make a platform for experts; we're trying to build 20% of the functionality for 80% of the users, not a million different options and configurations and different knobs to turn for experts only. What
Did you have to do if anything when you, when you started from? Okay, this is a sailplane, this is a soaring platform form built for sailplane pilots. To everybody was, was there, was there much of a change there? Well,
I didn't really know at all what hang glider or paraglider pilots wanted, so I started expanding my talk repertoire. So I do talks to gliding clubs and things like that, you know, teach them how to use Sky. So I teach them how we do it. So I started offering that to paragliding clubs and hang gliding clubs as well, and learning a bit more about what they need. And I decided I better bite the bullet and go do it myself. So I went to Charmany and did the first solo course and went solo off the peaks there and did a little bit of flying and paragliding to try and expand my understanding a bit more. And now I'm in contact with a number of the top paragliding pilots and they send me feedback and information about what they're up to and how the model is working for them and what they'd like to see. And we're trying to drive the development in that direction and I'm hoping to do some more paragliding and learn a bit more about it firsthand as well.
Well, I
got to ask you, did that, uh, is that set some of your passion for sailplanes aside or did it only make it grow?
Um, I think it, I think the sports are really very similar. Um, I understand that people have different objectives and we're flying different distances and that kind of thing. Um, but it was really remarkable to me flying paragliders for the first time, feeling thermals exactly the same as we do in sailplanes, just at one third of the speed. Like when you pull into the thermal, it's still all of the feeling and sensation is exactly the same. You feel the little cobblestones going in and a bit of turbulence and the gust. It's really just the same.
This is something I always want to ask sailplane pilots. What do you guys know? And you're quite young. I don't know that you're that representative of the sailplane world these days. But what do you know that paraglider pilots don't? you know what what have you learned about gliding in the atmosphere because you're traveling it you're just such a better glide what what what's something that maybe you wouldn't think was an is an obvious crossover yeah
It's hard to say, um, I mean the big differences are the obvious ones, like we can cross weather systems in a day, so we spend a lot of time, um, thinking about how we're going to make that transition from one to the other, whereas in paragliding you're trying to figure out how to get from one peak to another in the same weather system, and so I think we experience a much broader variety of conditions, and we're able to fly in much weaker and much stronger conditions, so I think it's just the diversity of experience that sailplane gliding offers that perhaps is much harder to achieve, or takes longer to achieve in paragliding, and but at the same time, in paragliding, and going so slow through the atmosphere, I think you really develop such a good understanding of what's going on around you, particularly at the low level, so I have a lot of respect for the paraglider pilots who come to sailplanes, and they almost never seem to outland, um, so for us in sailplanes, outlanding is a small disaster, it's a big hassle to come and retrieve with a trailer driving to a field, you can't just pack up your stuff and walk out, um, but the guys that come across from paragliding, there's so good at getting away from those low altitudes, they really understand what's going on in that bottom thousand feet super adiabatic way where in cell phones we just have no idea
Fascinating, fascinating, Matthew. I think we could make a show of just talking about this, but let's switch over to, uh, to your, to your platform, to SkySite, and let's teach everybody about that. So, folks listening, again, we're going to end the audio portion here, and, uh, and we'll, we'll have this up on YouTube, and we can all learn about how you, how to use SkySite if
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