June 2025 EZNews

Dr. Scott Dennstaedt
May 30
5 min read

Updated: Jun 8

Greetings and thank you for dedicating time to read the 50th edition of EZNews!

We appreciate those members who have opted for automatic monthly renewal of their EZWxBrief membership. If you haven't yet, please sign in and go to the User Profile page (see right) to tap or click on the Renew button. This allows you to set up your monthly renewal using a Visa, MasterCard, or Discover credit card, ensuring you continue to enjoy the simplicity of EZWxBrief.

Are you new to EZWxBrief?

For members new to EZWxBrief, you won't find EZWxBrief in the App Store or Google Play Store. For the best user experience, EZWxBrief is optimized to run as a progressive web app (PWA) and must be installed on your device which takes less than 10 seconds per device. Follow the instructions in this video or visit the 180+ page Pilots Guide for more information on how to install EZWxBrief as a PWA on all of your devices. For example, here's how to install EZWxBrief on your iPhone or iPad...it's that EZ!

Privatization of NOAA/NWS weather data continues...

Through the government efficiency umbrella (DOGE), the National Weather Service (NWS) is looking to retire the Model Analysis and Guidance (MAG) website in a continued effort to privatize NOAA. Currently, the EZWxBrief progressive web app heavily uses the MAG site to download/scrape much of the static weather imagery to make it available to users within the Imagery view. This will effect most of the model forecasts to include the HRRR, HREF, GFS and NAM. NOAA has already removed dozens of other "research" websites from the public view, a few of which were used by the app. The MAG Analysis and Guidance website has been around for over two decades serving the public with static weather imagery based on the various American NWP models.

While there are options to download a "similar" product from various commercial sites (although some of this is behind a paywall), there's no guarantee to find exact matches especially as it relates specifically to aviation weather guidance. Moreover, the cost to create these from scratch is not trivial. It requires a significant level of effort and computing resources which will increase the operating cost of the app.

We have already sent feedback, but would encourage all EZWxBrief users to also direct feedback on the potential retirement of the MAG website to the following address: nws.webfeedback@noaa.gov. Let them know that the MAG website provides aviation-specific static imagery that is not found anywhere else. We appreciate your help to avoid this unnecessary and costly change.

AirVenture savings continues through July 27th!

If you were not able to attend any of the three live aviation weather classes, you have the opportunity to get the lowest prices available on the recording for each of these three classes. This includes the Weather Essentials for Pilots, Advanced Weather Essentials for Pilots and the Skew-T Weather Essentials classes.

Weather Essentials for Pilots (12 classes)
Advanced Weather Essentials for Pilots (10 classes)
Skew-T Weather Essentials (12 classes)

Check out this free video from the sixth Advanced Weather Essentials for Pilots 10-week class that discusses convective guidance and considerations. This free video is nearly an hour long and will give you a sample of the content found in each of the three programs mentioned above.

Each program contains hyperlinks to all of the recorded videos as well as hyperlinks to PDFs containing the slides presented in each class. In addition to purchasing each of these three classes individually, for a limited time we are offering a Combo pricing for the Weather Essentials and Advanced Weather Essentials classes and a Triple Combo pricing to purchase all three programs.

Purchase now >>>

Upon purchase you will be provided a link to download a Summary Guide. This same link to the purchased program will also be provided within an email. The emailed link is valid for 30 days of purchase. This Summary Guide is a PDF that includes the following -

Table of contents
Hyperlinks to the unlisted video recordings of each class
Hyperlinks to a PDF containing the slides for each class
Hyperlinks to each quiz and quiz answers for each class (no quizzes are included for the Advanced Weather Essentials for Pilots class)

This content is provided for your personal use only. Please do not share this or post this content online. We appreciate your cooperation. This offer is available for a limited time and ends on July 27, 2025. Don't delay, purchase access to these programs today!

Attending AirVenture this year?

Hard to believe, but it's that time of the year again! EZWxBrief will have a booth at EAA's AirVenture in Hangar C (Booth 3082) this year and we are looking forward to meeting many of you there. This year will be a little bittersweet. With rising costs of attending this event, this will be our final time attending AirVenture as a vendor. Stop by Hangar C during the event and say hello and get a demonstration of EZWxBrief v2.0 or attend one of Scott's many forum presentations planned throughout the week with a preliminary schedule shown below. So mark your calendar. Please note that the forum schedule is still being finalized with EAA and will be posted in the July edition of EZNews. Stay tuned and hope to see you there!

Mon, July 21 at 8:30 am - Turbulence basics (Forum Stage 6)
Mon, July 21 at 2:30 pm - Intro to the Skew-T Diagram (Forum Stage 10)
Tue, July 22 at 10:00 am - Ice contaminated tailplane stalls (Forum Stage 9)
Wed, July 23 at 10 am - Deciphering flight level weather (Forum Stage 5)
Thu, July 24 at 11:30 am - A dangerous combo, IFR and weather (Forum Stage 10)
Thu, July 24 at 2:00 pm - Five weather rules of thumb that could kill you (PPC)
Fri, July 25 at 2:00 pm - 5 things you must know about datalink weather (AOPA Pavilion)

EZWxBrief v2 News

On Monday, May 12th, one of the servers that supports the EZWxBrief progressive web app was implicated in a Denial of Service attack. Hackers found a vulnerability in one of the components used to serve out a portion of the weather data used by the app. Once in, the hackers then used this server to flood one or more other sites in an attempt to deny service. Consequently, the server had to be completely shut down and restored from a recent backup.

The site was fully operational again on Monday, May 19th after we completely rebuilt all of the servers and hardened the security and updated the offending component to a version that had no known vulnerabilities. We also took the time to optimize the data processing, so the speed of the app was increased significantly. Specifically, the route profile renders nearly instantaneously now!

Please understand that no personal data or credit card information was compromised. We are working now to build an entirely new hardware architecture to hopefully create a system that is extremely secure and not vulnerable to these kinds of hacks. This new architecture should be rolled out later this summer.

EZWxBrief v2.0.3 is the current version. There have been no new releases at this point in time.