Hello all, sailplane enthusiast here. I have been entranced by the lure of infinite flight by means of thermal soaring, I've been looking to create a little instrument for my sailplane that searches for thermals by means of infrared imaging.

My current idea is to have an onboard GPS running on a Raspberry Pi which takes an infrared map generated from an IR camera, "crops" out the regions with the largest thermal readings, and overlays them onto the GPS display.

I know that a German paraglider took a FLIR up with him and claimed he achieved exactly what I described above, however, he was met with skepticism, because this method simply looks at the temperature differences on terrain and cannot see temperature differences in the ambient air (this remains the problem with my theory, as I am aware that thermals are mainly caused by the uneven heating of the Earth, however, other factors such as differences in terrain height creating updrafts which wouldn't be observed by my instrument)

I am not aware of any other instrument that could be used to detect temperature differences in the ambient air save for something like a Doppler radar, which would require extensive (not to mention expensive!) FCC permission and a bunch of tinkering with radar which is beyond my understanding.

I'm sure this idea isn't new, but I'm really hellbent on inventing something to give me some extra altitude for hours on end.

I'd like y'alls thoughts on this idea, surely I'm not the only one who has thought about this? Is there any other way could I go about this besides thermal imaging?

Thank you in advance, happy New Year from the sunny Rio Grande Valley in Texas.