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Free Drone Weather Checker — Real-World Flight Time & Session Planner for DJI Filmmakers
Generic weather apps report surface wind — the number that matters least to a drone at 80 metres. Enter your location and drone model, and this tool fetches wind at 10m, 80m, and 120m altitude, runs it through a drone-specific safety model, scores the shoot quality against the golden hour window, and returns a colour-coded Go/No-Go verdict for every hour of the day — free, no account, no app download.
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The Fundamentals
What Does the Drone Weather Checker Compute?
The Drone Weather & Fly Scorer is a free browser-based tool that connects to Open-Meteo’s forecast API and returns two separate scores for any location in the world: a Safety Score and a Shoot Quality Score, each from 0 to 100. Both update live as you select different hours, change the drone model, or adjust your flying hours filter. No weather app subscription. No account creation. No app installation.
The Safety Score runs your location’s forecast through a layered penalty model tuned to drone flight. Wind at 80 metres — the altitude that actually matters for a DJI drone in normal operation — is checked against your specific drone’s rated maximum and safe operating threshold. Gusts are assessed separately and penalised more aggressively than sustained wind, because a gust 5 km/h above the drone’s limit causes a loss of control event that sustained wind at the same speed would not. Precipitation probability, visibility for visual line of sight compliance, temperature and its effect on battery capacity, and WMO weather codes for thunderstorms, fog, and snow all carry their own deductions. The score then maps to a verdict: 75 or above is Go, 44–74 is Caution, and below 44 is No-Go. Every active penalty appears as a colour-coded flag beneath the hero card so you know exactly what dropped your score.
The Shoot Quality Score operates independently of safety. It evaluates the same hour through the lens of aerial cinematography. Golden hour windows — 45 minutes either side of sunrise or sunset — add 30 points. Blue hour adds 25. Partial cloud cover between 30% and 70% adds 20 points for its natural diffusion effect. A clear sky adds 10. Flat midday light between 10:00 and 15:00 deducts 15. Rain risk deducts 20. Both scores update simultaneously whenever you click a different hour in the hourly forecast bar.
Sunrise and sunset times are calculated from the Open-Meteo daily data for your exact coordinates and timezone. The tool marks both events on the hourly bar with coloured indicators — coral for sunrise, teal for sunset — so golden hour windows are immediately visible at a glance.
The Best Windows section runs a sliding 90-minute window across every hour within your set flying hours and finds three peaks independently: best safety, best shooting, and best combined. Each result shows the start and end time, the relevant score, and the verdict for that window. The 3-Day Outlook table extends the same analysis across all three days of the forecast, with each row clickable to switch the date picker and reload the hourly view for that day.
The Wind at Altitude chart is an SVG line graph showing wind speed at 10m, 80m, and 120m across all 24 hours of the selected day. Two dashed horizontal lines mark your drone’s safe threshold and rated maximum. A draggable cursor sits at the currently selected hour. Clicking any point on the chart selects that hour and updates every section of the tool simultaneously.
The Share Link button encodes your location, drone, date, hour, and flying hours into the URL and copies it to the clipboard. Anyone opening that link sees the tool pre-loaded with your exact inputs.
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Why Surface Wind Speed Is the Wrong Number for Drone Pilots
Every consumer weather app reports wind at 10 metres above the ground. That is the standard meteorological measurement height. It is also largely irrelevant to a drone in flight. A DJI Air 3S hovering at 80 metres for a timelapse sequence is not in the same airflow as the surface reading. The difference is not academic — it is measurable, consistent, and frequently the margin between a stable hover and a flyaway.
Wind speed increases with altitude. The relationship follows what atmospheric scientists call the wind power law: wind at height h equals the surface wind multiplied by (h/h₀)^α, where h₀ is the reference height of 10 metres and α is a roughness exponent that depends on terrain. Over open water, α is around 0.1. Over open terrain with low obstacles, it is 0.14. Over a built-up urban area, it can reach 0.4. In practice, a surface wind of 20 km/h over a park becomes approximately 26–29 km/h at 80 metres, and potentially 32–36 km/h at 120 metres in urban terrain. The DJI Mini 4K’s maximum wind resistance is 29 km/h. That surface reading of 20 km/h is not safe.
Open-Meteo provides forecast data at 10m, 80m, and 120m — the three altitudes this tool uses. The 80m reading is the primary input to the safety score because it closely matches the typical drone operating altitude for aerial photography and timelapse. The 120m reading flags when the airspace at the legal maximum ceiling carries significantly higher wind than what you feel on the ground. The 10m reading appears in the wind metric card and the altitude chart for reference and comparison.
Gusts matter more than sustained wind and are treated differently by the scoring model. A gust is a sudden, brief increase in wind speed. DJI’s wind resistance ratings are for sustained wind — steady state. A gust that exceeds the rated maximum for one to three seconds is enough to exceed the drone’s ability to compensate, particularly during a return-to-home at altitude or during a tracking shot where the drone’s attitude is already pitched forward. The safety model deducts 40 points for gusts at or above the drone’s rated maximum, compared to 50 points for sustained wind above the same threshold. Gusts at or above the safe threshold deduct 20 points independently.
Temperature compounds wind risk by reducing battery capacity. At 0°C, lithium polymer cells deliver approximately 30% less usable charge than at room temperature. The drone’s ability to fight wind depends directly on available power. A day with 25 km/h sustained wind is manageable for a DJI Air 3S in warm weather. The same wind at 0°C with a 30%-depleted effective capacity is a different situation. The battery impact text in the temperature metric card changes at 5°C and 0°C, with a hard warning when the temperature falls below the drone’s rated minimum operating temperature — 0°C for the DJI Mini 4K and Lito 1, −10°C for the Air 3S, Mini 5 Pro, and Lito X1.
Visibility affects not just the quality of the footage but your legal obligation. Most national aviation frameworks require the drone pilot to maintain visual line of sight at all times. The standard VLOS threshold in EU and UK regulations is a minimum visibility of approximately 1.5–3 km depending on category and conditions. The safety score deducts 30 points when visibility drops below 1,500 metres and 15 points below 3,000 metres — reflecting both the regulatory risk and the practical difficulty of maintaining visual contact.
Step-by-Step Guide
How to Use the Drone Battery & Session Plannerr
Step 1 — Enter your location
Type your city, address, or landmark into the location field. The tool queries OpenStreetMap's Nominatim geocoder with a 400ms debounce and displays up to five matching results as you type. Click any result and the tool immediately fetches the forecast for those coordinates. Your detected latitude and longitude appear in small text below the field for verification. If you allow browser location access, the GPS button detects your position automatically, reverse-geocodes it to a place name, and loads the forecast without any typing. Denied location access is handled gracefully — the tool falls back to the location input with an explanatory note.
Step 2 — Select your drone model
Choose your drone from the dropdown. The tool loads that model's manufacturer-rated maximum wind resistance and safe operating threshold directly into the scoring engine. Every safety score, wind metric colour, threshold line on the altitude chart, and flag on the safety panel changes to reflect your specific drone. The DJI Inspire 3 tolerates 50 km/h; the DJI Mini 4K is rated to 29 km/h. Using the wrong model gives you a misleading verdict. The drone selection also activates model-specific temperature warnings — the DJI Lito 1, for example, has a rated minimum operating temperature of 0°C and receives a hard red flag below that threshold, whereas the Lito X1 is rated to −10°C.
Step 3 — Set your date and flying hours
The date picker defaults to today. Use the left and right arrows to step forward or back one day, or click Today to reset. The tool constrains the picker to the three days covered by the forecast. The flying hours filter — two time inputs labelled From and To — dims any hours outside your planned window in the hourly bar and excludes them from the Best Windows calculation. Set this to your realistic shooting window before reviewing the results. A sunrise-to-sunset window and a narrower golden-hour-only window will produce different Best Windows results for the same day.
Step 4 — Read the hero verdict card
After clicking Check Weather, the full-width hero card is the first result you see. It shows the verdict for the currently selected hour — Go in green, Caution in amber, No-Go in red — alongside the Safety Score and Shoot Quality Score out of 100, the wind speed at 80m and gust speed, and your drone's rated limit with a pass or fail indicator. The four metric cards below the hero show wind at all three altitudes, sky conditions and visibility, temperature with battery impact text, and shoot quality with the primary reason. All five elements update simultaneously whenever you click a different hour in the hourly bar.
Step 5 — Scan the hourly bar and select the best window
The horizontal hourly bar shows all 24 hours of the selected day. Each column displays the hour, a weather icon, a coloured verdict dot, wind speed at 80m, and precipitation probability. Sunrise and sunset are marked with coloured top borders. Hours outside your flying hours filter are dimmed and excluded from scoring. Click any column to update the hero card, metric cards, flags, and all other sections to that hour's data. The Best Windows section below the flags panel runs the sliding window analysis across your filtered flying hours and identifies the peak 90-minute block for safety, for shooting, and for the combined score — each with a time range, score, and verdict pill.
Step 6 — Export the report and share the link
The Copy Conditions button generates a plain-text weather report containing your location, date and time, drone model, verdict, both scores, wind and gust readings, sky conditions, visibility, temperature, battery impact, and best windows — with an explicit reminder to check airspace and NOTAMs before flying. Paste it into a note, a message to a client, or a crew briefing. The Share Link button encodes your full settings into a URL and copies it to the clipboard. Anyone opening that link sees the tool pre-loaded with your location, drone, date, selected hour, and flying hours intact.
FAQ — Drone Battery & Session Planner
What wind speed is too high to fly a drone?
It depends on your drone model. The DJI Mini 4K and Neo 2 are rated to 29 km/h maximum. The Mini 4 Pro, Flip, Avata 2, Lito 1, and Lito X1 are rated to 38 km/h. The Air 3, Air 3S, Mavic 3 series, Mavic 4 Pro, and Mini 5 Pro are rated to 43 km/h. The Inspire 3 handles up to 50 km/h. These figures are for sustained wind, measured at the drone’s altitude — not at ground level. Gusts above the rated maximum are more dangerous than the same sustained wind speed, because the drone’s stabilisation cannot react to the sudden load change in time. In practice, flying at 80–90% of the rated maximum is a sensible working limit for production work.
Can I fly a drone in 20 mph winds?
20 mph is approximately 32 km/h. For a DJI Air 3S or Mavic 3 series with a 43 km/h maximum rating, 32 km/h is within limits but above the safe threshold for stable footage — expect visible horizon drift and increased battery draw to maintain position. For a DJI Mini 4K or Neo 2 with a 29 km/h maximum, 32 km/h is above the rated limit and the correct answer is no. The critical factor is wind at your drone’s operating altitude, not at the surface. A 20 mph surface reading can translate to 26–34 mph at 80 metres depending on terrain, which puts a Mini-class drone at or above its rated limit.
Does temperature affect drone battery life?
Yes, significantly. Lithium polymer batteries lose capacity as temperature drops because the electrochemical reactions that release charge slow down in cold conditions. At 5°C, expect approximately 10–15% less usable flight time. At 0°C, the reduction reaches 20–30%. Below 0°C, most DJI drones warn you in the DJI Fly app and will not arm at very low temperatures. Pre-warming batteries in an inside pocket or a dedicated battery warmer before the shoot recovers most of the lost capacity. The temperature metric card in this tool shows the battery impact text for the selected hour, and the safety score deducts points at 5°C and 0°C thresholds to account for the reduced power margin available to fight wind.
What is the difference between surface wind and wind at altitude?
Surface wind is measured at 10 metres above the ground — the standard meteorological reference height used by weather stations and consumer apps. Wind at altitude is the actual speed at your drone’s operating height, which is consistently higher due to the wind speed profile. Wind increases with altitude following the power law: over open terrain, a 20 km/h surface wind becomes approximately 26 km/h at 80 metres and 28 km/h at 120 metres. Over urban terrain with more surface roughness, the increase is steeper. This tool fetches wind data at 10m, 80m, and 120m from Open-Meteo’s forecast API, uses the 80m figure as the primary safety input, and shows all three lines on the altitude chart so you can see the profile for yourself.
What is VLOS and why does it affect when I can fly?
VLOS stands for Visual Line of Sight. In most countries and regulatory frameworks — including EU EASA Open Category rules, UK CAA regulations, and FAA Part 107 — drone pilots must keep the drone in direct visual contact at all times without visual aids other than corrective lenses. The practical minimum visibility for VLOS compliance is generally stated as 1.5–3 km depending on category and conditions. Below that threshold, you cannot legally confirm your drone’s position and attitude from the ground. Fog, mist, heavy rain, and smoke are the most common causes of VLOS-breaking visibility. This tool’s safety score deducts 30 points for visibility below 1,500 metres and 15 points below 3,000 metres.
Can you fly a drone in rain?
Most consumer and prosumer DJI drones have no water resistance rating. None of the drones in this tool’s preset list — Mini series, Air series, Mavic series, Lito series — are IP-rated or designed for wet conditions. Flying in rain risks water ingress into the motor windings, ESCs, and gimbal assembly. Damage from moisture is not covered under DJI’s standard warranty. The safety score deducts 35 points when precipitation probability reaches 70% and 15 points above 40%. A Caution or No-Go verdict for rain is a hard recommendation to reschedule. If rain is forecast at any point during a multi-hour shoot, monitor probability by the hour rather than using a daily average figure.
How does the shoot quality score work?
The Shoot Quality Score is a separate 0–100 rating that evaluates each hour for aerial cinematography rather than flight safety. It starts at 50 as a neutral baseline and adjusts for lighting conditions. Golden hour — the 45-minute window either side of sunrise or sunset — adds 30 points. Blue hour adds 25. Partial cloud between 30% and 70% (natural softbox conditions) adds 20 points. Clear sky adds 10. Harsh midday sun between 10:00 and 15:00 with low cloud cover deducts 15 points. Rain probability above 50% deducts 20. The score is calculated using the sunrise and sunset times for your exact coordinates and timezone, so golden hour windows are accurate for your specific location rather than approximate.
What is the best time of day to fly a drone for photography?
The best times are the 45 minutes before and after sunrise, and the 45 minutes before and after sunset — collectively known as golden hour. During these windows, the sun is near the horizon, shadows are long, and the light has a warm, directional quality that defines objects in the frame and produces the high-contrast, textured look that makes aerial footage visually striking. The 30 minutes after sunset and before sunrise — blue hour — produces a cooler, more uniform light that is particularly effective for urban skylines and architecture. This tool’s Shoot Quality Score identifies both windows automatically, and the Best Windows section highlights the golden hour block as the recommended shooting window whenever it falls within your flying hours.
What wind speed can a DJI Air 3S handle?
The DJI Air 3S is rated for a maximum wind resistance of 12 m/s, which is 43.2 km/h or approximately 26.8 mph — equivalent to Beaufort force 6. In practice, the safe operating threshold for stable footage and controlled manoeuvring is lower, around 32 km/h. Above that, the gimbal works harder to compensate, you see increased battery drain from the motors fighting the load, and precise positional control for tracked shots becomes difficult. This tool sets the Air 3S safe threshold at 32 km/h and the maximum at 43 km/h. Wind at 80 metres — the operating altitude — is used for both checks, not the surface wind reported by standard weather apps.
Is UAV Forecast still free?
UAV Forecast moved most of its features behind a paid subscription in 2023 and subsequently closed entirely. The app is no longer available for download in most regions. This tool was built specifically to replace the core weather-scoring functionality that UAV Forecast provided to drone pilots and aerial photographers — a fast, free, location-specific go/no-go verdict with wind at altitude, temperature warnings, and a shoot quality rating. No account is required, no subscription exists, and the tool runs entirely in the browser using Open-Meteo’s free forecast API for weather data and OpenStreetMap Nominatim for geocoding.
Also From AeroTimelapse
Complete Your Pre-Shoot Workflow
Know whether 80-metre wind exceeds your drone’s rated limit before you’re standing on location watching the horizon drift in your footage. Know your best safety window and your best shoot window for the day — and whether they’re the same 90 minutes or two different ones. A green sky on your phone’s weather app has never once been the same thing as a Go verdict for a drone.
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