island weather
It is raining in St. Croix where I sit this morning, so I've had a little time.
One thing that we haven't talked much about is some interesting island / sea weather dynamics. It is very neat to see that the majority of the precipitation and vertical cloud development is usually highly concentrated over land masses. As you're flying along over hundreds of miles of water, you can usually very easily pick out the islands from above simply based on the big blobs of clouds on the horizon. You can even see this on very small scale on inland lakes. In general, unless we're dealing with some major weather system, we consider "out to sea" to be our safe place from convective weather.
For example, when we came out of Puerta Plata in the Dominican Republic last week from our fuel stop, it was raining on and off at the airport. However, you could see blue sky just 10mi offshore. We took off in the rain and made an immediate turn midfield, northbound to that clear air offshore, then started the turn back on course. This is a very common thing. The chance of rain on the island is high, but offshore 10, 20, 30mi, blue skies.
On the way here to St. Croix from Grenada yesterday, sitting at 8500', we could identify at least 150mi worth of individual islands just based on cloud development... Cloud buildups as a navigational tool is a nifty concept
. Weather data way down south becomes quite sparse and unreliable in our experience. Our major weather product is the big Caribbean visible, infra, and vapor satellite imagery.
Disclaimer: This did NOT apply last Monday evening when some of us made the final push to St. Kitts. That was way too many miles of many layers all the way to the surface which was a first for us out here, and those of us that made it won't soon forget.