It’s partly to build up your habit of getting a briefing and partly to make sure you got the gist. Getting the gist means developing the skill, as you progress toward dual cross-countries and solo flying, of sorting what can seem like a huge data dump into an understandable picture of current and expected conditions for the flight’s duration.

Checking your work in this regard doesn’t mean a prolonged ground session parsing every image, graph, and line of text. If you can clearly answer a few basic questions about the flight weather, it should suffice to demonstrate that you are productively processing the presentation of the weather.

• What’s the big picture? Use the surface analysis chart for this one. Explain how the positions of low and high pressure systems and fronts help shape local conditions, and how the isobars roughly reveal wind direction and intensity.
• Is the trend getting better or worse? Don’t let a forecast of weather deteriorating late in the day turn your flight into a race against the clock (and clouds). Proceed with caution. If the trend is for improvement, keep watch while flying that the actual weather is cooperating.

By the book

The objective of the Weather Information task on the private pilot practical test is to determine that the applicant exhibits satisfactory knowledge, risk management, and skills associated with weather information for a flight under VFR.
• What flight conditions should you expect? You should have some idea whether to expect turbulence—perhaps at some altitudes but not others—and what runways may be active, and whether there’s a crosswind landing in your near future.
• Did you do your dewpoint diligence? A high dewpoint and/or a small temperature/dewpoint spread could spell fast-forming ground fog in calm-wind conditions as the sun goes down.
• Do observations confirm or contradict the data? A pilot report of an overcast or precip on a route that was forecast to be clear—or other notable inconsistencies with the forecast—calls for further research. Such conflicts are not unusual and sometimes presage the transmission of an amended forecast.

Major inconsistencies should remind you to recheck the date and time of the weather data you used to plan the flight. If that information was nearing the end of its shelf life, a fresh batch of facts and figures could be coming out soon—possibly painting a very different weather picture.