Great point Neva, the comments I see in these threads from RL soaring pilots tend to be drowned out a little by suggested models trying to build thermals around Cloud size, height and depth etc. That is a back to front approach and as every soaring pilot knows, the cloud is simply a result of relative air temperature and dew point.
Thermals exist with or without clouds so building a “thermal” model around clouds will always be flawed.
The thermals dont get stronger because the cloud gets bigger… the cloud gets bigger cause the thermal gets stronger.
In essence all the information needed to build a thermal model exists if you look at Skew-T and Temperature trace diagrams - this will tell you the expected thermal strength, cloud base, height, Convective available potential energy etc.
To this point, there are many tools already using this information to very accurately predict soaring weather (Skysight, RASP, Windy) using freely available MET information.
To me it would make perfect sense if you wanted to build a live weather model, you should be looking at this information.
To build a weather model where you can select the type of day you want, you should be adjusting the basic variables such as temp, dew point, inversion and cape.