Sure!
For example, if you have a rise of 500 feet per mile, and the run is one nautical mile, you divide rise over run, move the decimal over two places (x 100) and then you have a gradient.
A good rule of thumb is to take the gradient times your groundspeed to have and estimated climb rate in feet per minute. Or, you can look at the rate of climb table in the front of the Jeppesen (tables and codes) book.
I'm dusting off my trigonometry here, so mathematically the vertical distance that you are climbing equals the sine of 8.23 times the opposite over the hypotenuse: take that distance and divide it by 360 to arrive at feet per minute.
Last edited by geosynchronous; 05-05-2009 at 04:00 AM.