500 ft. AGL is pretty low. Hopefully, you’ve taken your drone up to 400 ft. AGL before and have a good feel for whether or not you’ve got full cloud coverage at 500-900 ft. AGL or higher.
One reliable way to get an accurate cloud base measurement for the specific location where you’re flying is to use the cloud base calculation formula.
You’d need to find the surface temperature, and then the dew point. There are various weather apps and websites that you can pull up for this — once you have those two data points, here’s the formula:
1) Find the difference between the surface temperature and the dew point. This value is known as the “spread.”
2) Divide the spread by 4.4 (if temp is in °F) or 2.5 (if temp is °C), then multiply by 1000.
This will give you cloud base in height AGL.500 ft. AGL is pretty low. Hopefully, you’ve taken your drone up to 400 ft. AGL before and have a good feel for whether or not you’ve got full cloud coverage at 500-900 ft. AGL or higher.
One reliable way to get an accurate cloud base measurement for the specific location where you’re flying is to use the cloud base calculation formula.
You’d need to find the surface temperature, and then the dew point. There are various weather apps and websites that you can pull up for this — once you have those two data points, here’s the formula:
1) Find the difference between the surface temperature and the dew point. This value is known as the “spread.”
2) Divide the spread by 4.4 (if temp is in °F) or 2.5 (if temp is °C), then multiply by 1000.
This will give you cloud base in height AGL.
