This forum allows RASP (Regional Atmospheric Soaring Prediction) users and operators/developers to post comments and discuss RASP forecast predictions.  I will also be making posts regarding RASP changes as model development continues.  To keep yourself automatically up-to-date, you can opt to have emails of new posts sent to you (or reverse that option) by clicking the "(Un)Subscribe" link above. 

I expect this forum to be the medium for RASP questions and answers, so if you send me a personal email and I deem that there is nothing of a personal nature in your email then you will simply get a reply requesting that you post to this forum.  [If there is some matter that you feel is private, please describe your reason when sending an mail to me.]

I normally wait at least three days before personally responding to a new topic (unless a new post is one that only I will have the answer for), to give other users a chance to respond first.  And then I will only post if I think something significant has been left unsaid - so others should not wait for me to reply first.  I'd like my role to be akin to trailing a parade of elephants and cleaning the street behind them. 

I don't see my role as being a substitute for a Forum search or for reading the RASP wiki information already on-line!  Posters with questions who have already "done some homework" or have tried and failed to find the answer to a question - as indicated in the posting - will find me much more responsive than those who simply post a half-baked question immediately after it has popped to mind.  Similarly, those running the RASP program who encounter errors are expected to resolve them using information available in the RASPop wiki, as can be done in most cases, posting a message here only when that resource is incomplete (and in the latter case providing useful details regarding the problem).  Frankly, my reaction to some postings is: "if they can't bother make some effort on their part, then I don't see why I should bother to help". 

I will fix any errors in RASP scripts and if you find such they should be reported here.  However, I do not intend to be an on-call debugger for everyone who attempts to create a RASP site, so will respond to reported problems only when there is an apparent script error or when information in the RASP wiki is insufficient. 

I will generally not explain specific RASP forecasts or weather prediction modelling in general - some information on these topics can be viewed at the /RASPop/WebHome">RASP Help webpage. Also, this is not a forum for answering any weather-related question posed by anyone in the world, so may choose to ignore any questions not directly related to RASP operations.  But such questions might be answered by others who read this forum.  Please note that weather prediction is inherently noisy, so evaluation of prediction accuracy requires an extended series of observations, e.g. over a full soaring season; further, evaluating forecasts for a specific site generally requires some "local knowledge" concerning that site and its idiosyncrasies, such as its relation to surrounding terrain. 

This bulletin board allows much personalization if cookies are enabled by your browser, and it will then keep track of the messages you have looked at and indicate which messages are "NEW" since your last visit. Currently the default setting for new users is indexing by a "Threaded List" (messages sorted by topic) with the thread having the most recent posting within it being on top (called "UBB Order") - I recommend that you keep that preference since on this forum postings to a thread can occur infrequently or as a much later follow-up to an earlier thread, so you will not miss postings which occur at a much later date than the start of the thread. The default message display is "Guestbook" style, in which all messages in a thread are shown in a single frame.

Finally, if you want to get fancy you can insert the following "turn-on" "turn-off" markup instructions (similar to HTML markup code) to alter the text appearance between the "beginning" and "end" markups:
      [code] Make the in-between text unformatted [/code]
      [b] Make the in-between text bold [/b]
      [i] Make the in-between text italic [/i]
      [red] Make the in-between text red [/red]
      [big] Make the in-between text bigger [/big]
      [small] Make the in-between text smaller [/small]