🎃 Happy Festive Gourd Season, fellow fliers. This issue opens with an accidentally dramatic tourist photograph I took from the summit of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh last month. My JFK-to-EDI flight was the first international trip I've taken since adding overseas-forecast support to BumpySkies this past spring, and I have to tell you, every time the plane juddered through a patch of moderate North Atlantic chop exactly as the website predicted, I felt the most backhanded sort of joy imaginable.

Back in the States now, I shall proceed with a couple of BumpySkies commemorations, followed by a bit of civic bluster, and then some updates about the website. There's also a one-question reader poll, for reasons you'll soon discover.

A reflection on the past year

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my returning to active BumpySkies development. So much has changed since then, and I'm thrilled to say that the website's usage has doubled to around 16,000 monthly active users (spiking well above 20,000 during peak travel seasons). I read this as a positive reflection of all the ways that BumpySkies has changed and grown over the last year, while staying true to my original vision of demystifying flight for nervous fliers.

The appearance of this newsletter is one of those changes, of course! The first issue from last October might not have had much to say yet, but enough has happened with BumpySkies to fill out ten issues in the subsequent year. I'm also happy to announce that, since the previous issue, BumpySkies News has gained enough readership to surpass Buttondown's free-tier limit of 100 subscribers. Happily, the cost of the newsletter platform's first paid tier is neatly covered by the income from a couple of BumpySkies First Class subscriptions, so I quite honestly feel pretty good about the whole thing.

I almost titled this section "Farewell to the free tier", but that would have falsely implied that I was waving good-bye to BumpySkies's own free features. As I wrote this past summer, BumpySkies's core turbulence forecasts will always remain free, so long as the flight and weather data that it relies on continues to be made free for public use by the US government.

Which brings us to the civic bluster I promised earlier:

Vote to defend climate science

Midterm elections have begun in the United States, with much of the country allowing early voting. If you're an adult American citizen, I encourage you to vote on or before Tuesday, November 3, the sooner the better; I cast my own ballot here in New York yesterday.

And when you do vote, I'd like you to keep the future of climate science in mind. The Trump administration has been ruthless in its attempts to dismantle American science and research institutions since coming into power last year. This includes attacks on the funding or even continued existence of NOAA and NCAR, both of which help produce the free public atmospheric data that BumpySkies relies upon.

The MAGA-poisoned congressional majority has stood silently by to allow this destruction—regardless of the fact that these institutions enjoyed broad bipartisan support pre-Trump. To block further damage and have any hope of repairing it, America needs to restore Democratic majorities in Congress, courts, and governorships. So that's what I voted for, and I hope you'll join me.

But while BumpySkies does remain free, let's talk about what's new with it.

New Nelly art

The website's various "Sorry, this forecast isn't ready yet" pages feature this new bit of artwork by Flynn Nichols of Nelly, our brave little groundhog mascot. This replaces the picture of Nelly enjoying a cocktail while riding a coin-operated kiddie plane, which continues to decorate the turbulence FAQ and other pages.

I asked Flynn to draw Nelly holding a deliciously trashy romance novel that she presumably just bought at the Hudson News stand nearest to her gate, even though she's just slightly too nervous to actually read it. Still: she is determined to get on that plane, whenever it actually shows up. This attitude is the spirit in which I present BumpySkies.

I literally just realized that now that I use a paid Buttondown tier, I can attach polls and surveys to my newsletters. Let's try one right now!

Lots of little forecast improvements

I've had two round-trip flights since the last newsletter issue, so many of these improvements happened at airport bars in EDI, JFK, or BGR, after some aspect of the website either inspired or annoyed me. I have yet to make a BumpySkies improvement while actually in flight, and look forward to marking that occasion when it does arrive.

• Last winter, after NOAA relocated the domestic-weather datasource that BumpySkies uses, the website would build forecasts around turbulence data that was off by two hours. This happened due to a subtle difference in timing between NOAA's new and old data sources, one that I didn't catch until recently. That's fixed now.

• Long international routes now fill in flight-plan gaps with great-circle arcs, rather than naive straight lines across a flat latitude/longitude grid. This especially improves the accuracy of trans-oceanic flight forecasts.

• BumpySkies had a gap in how it treated data around the geographic "seam" between NOAA's domestic NOMADS data for the contiguous US and the WAFS-derived data that covers the rest of the world. I discovered this when my flights to and from Edinburgh had suspiciously clear forecasts over Newfoundland with turbulence forecasted to its immediate east and west—and, as a passenger, this break did not match my experience. This also affected forecasts that crossed the Caribbean, northern Mexico, and the eastern Pacific. I fixed it by having BumpySkies always use WAFS data whenever NOMADS has no turbulence data for a given location.

• Improvements to the BumpySkies FAA message parser allow more international flights to now have their forecasts ready much earlier than before.

• First Class subscribers can now stay logged into BumpySkies across up to three separate devices. Log in using your phone, your tablet, and your laptop, and BumpySkies no longer kicks you off your other devices' sessions!

• BumpySkies would sometimes show hours-old turbulence maps for an upcoming flight even after fresher weather data had arrived. No longer: the website deletes all of its cached turbulence maps for upcoming flights every time it processes new turbulence data, guaranteeing that the forecasts it displays will always be as fresh as its underlying data.

• And various tiny improvements in forecasting any flight's most-likely minute-by-minute position and altitude and thus and such, each of which makes forecasts a little more accurate.

A tip jar

Finally, I redesigned the forecast page a bit so that forecast maps have a little tip-jar section underneath them. If you ever want to show your appreciation to BumpySkies by chipping in a little dosh, but without purchasing a full First Class monthly subscription, you may now do so. All tips support the continued operation of BumpySkies, and I receive each one with sincere gratitude.

And, with that gratitude, I close out this issue of BumpySkies News. Over the past year, I have come to recognize BumpySkies as not merely a fun project of personal interest, but one of the most important projects that I've ever had a hand in building. The monthly visitor totals, the newsletter and First Class subscriptions, and most especially the personal feedback I receive from its users let me know just how important the website is, for so many travelers, every day. I plan to keep BumpySkies a resource that helps bring a measure of friendly reassurance to my fellow nervous fliers for many years to come.

Smooth and swift travel as always,

--jmac