What is net vario? Reading what the air actually did

When you say "I'm climbing at 2 m/s" in a thermal, that number blends two things: the air rising and your wing sinking through that air. Raw vario can't separate them.

What net vario does

Net vario adds the wing's own sink back onto the measured climb. The result is the air's true vertical speed:

• Measured climb: +2.0 m/s
• Glider circling sink: ~1.3 m/s
• Air-mass climb: ~3.3 m/s

So the air was actually rising at 3.3 m/s; because you were sinking through it, the vario read 2.0.

Why it matters

Comparing wings. Climbing at 2 m/s on a high-performance wing represents different air than 2 m/s on a school wing — their sink rates differ. Net vario removes that difference and shows how strong the air really was.

Better decisions. Knowing a thermal's true strength sharpens the stay-or-leave call.

Where in Variograph

In the thermals table on the advanced analysis page you'll see an "Air Climb" column for each thermal — the polar-corrected air-mass climb next to the raw average. It's also the foundation of the flight scores and the wind profile.

Because the correction uses your wing's polar, picking the right wing in settings changes the result directly. Upload your flights to the dashboard and you can compare the same thermals across wings.

Read next

The other way to read what the air did runs through energy: energy altitude and the stick thermal. And how much these numbers can be trusted depends on the raw track — see IGC data quality.