How we work out the best time for a balloon ride

What counts as a calm morning

A morning counts as calm when every weather report from 1 hour before sunrise to 1 hour after sunrise shows:

• wind at or under 10 knots,
• gusts at or under 15 knots,
• no rain, snow, drizzle, thunder or fog.

10 knots is the official surface-wind limit for passenger hot air balloon flights in Turkey, set by the aviation authority (SHGM). The balloons take off around sunrise, so we check the two hours around it.

Where the data comes from

• Nevşehir Kapadokya airport (LTAZ), about 27 km west of Göreme. Its weather reports come every 30 minutes. We use the reports from December 2010 to 17 October 2026, from the archive of the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
• ERA5, the weather record of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), for the point of Göreme, from January 2010. We use it to check the airport numbers.

The two sources agree on the pattern: summer mornings are calm, winter mornings are often not. The airport numbers are the stricter of the two, so the site shows them.

How we work out "the chance in N nights"

We do not multiply the chance of one morning. We take every real run of 2, 3 or 4 mornings in a row in the record, and count how many of those runs had at least one calm morning. Calm and windy mornings come in spells, so this gives a lower and more honest number than a multiplication. Each run counts for the month of its first morning.

How the year calendar works

The calendar on your result shows each date of the year. One date alone has only about 16 mornings in the record, which is too few. So each date shows the share of calm sunrises over that date and the 3 days before and after it.

What the numbers cannot tell you

• A calm morning is not always a ride. In 2025 the balloons went up on 223 days (SHGM figures). Wind higher up, fog and low cloud stop some calm mornings too, mostly in winter.
• The airport is not the valley. Göreme sits lower, between rock walls. The local wind can differ from the airport wind.
• The past is not a forecast. These numbers show what usually happens in a month or a week. For tomorrow, look at the official flag the evening before.

How we will make it better

Since October 2026 we record the official SHGM flag for every morning. When the record is long enough, we will compare our calm mornings with the days the balloons really went up, and correct the numbers.

Credits

Nevşehir Kapadokya airport reports, December 2010 to October 2026, from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (Iowa State University). Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (ERA5, © ECMWF, CC-BY-4.0). The numbers are on the data page.