Meteo·Mobile Blog

The Blog for Mobile Aviation Weather for smartphones

Tag Archives: pilot

We’re excited with Flight condition Statistics

By now, you should know we’ve been working on metar statistics (there are 3 other posts, or so)

The fact  is that lots of information can be gathered from METARs through time (temperature, wind, dew point and cloud base profiles…)
At one point, we were even asked to evaluate forecast reliability (through METAR-TAF difference)

But for now, we elected to keep it simple and monitor how much an aiport is in VFR conditions.

My initial intention was for the stranger pilot to be able to get an idea of how ‘bad’ an airport could be in a particular month, or time of day.
So we started saving flight condition statistics back on Dec the 1st, 2008. So far, we’ve stored over 30 Million flight condition reports !!!

Well, let me tell you that we’ve found database and server load challenges… But we’ve kept up.

And recenlty, we’ve started to analyze whether all of that storage made any sense. Let me show you…

Below we have a chart for LELL flight condition statistics from Dec’08 to Jun’09:

LELL flight condition statistics

LELL flight condition statistics

Here you can easily see what a nice airport LELL (Sabadell in Spain) is to fly to in VFR conditions:
The percentage represents the number of VFR, MVFR, IFR or LIFR METAR reports (according to this flight conditions definition)
On the horizontal axis you have each month (with time of day inside). So we can see that back in February, the morning and night METAR reports had less VFR conditions than those around noon. You can also see that the closer you get to the summer months, the more VFR conditions existing at LELL.

Let’s see what this looks like at the famous low visibility LIMC (Milano Malpensa in Italy):

Flight condition statistics at LIMC

Flight condition statistics at LIMC

What a difference!

Here, we can see that back in the December-January period on average only about 40% of the METARs where reporting VFR conditions.
Here too, the closer we get to summer time, the better it gets.

What we see seems now worth the time and effort we put into gathering statistics.

We’re not quite ready to share this sort of reports with the general public, but have started working on it.

As usual, please let us know how you like it.

Airliner weather

I’ve always wondered what sort of weather briefings an airliner pilot gets.

The way I’ve always imagined that is:

The flight commander goes to the operations office and gets an envelope with plenty of information that a team of specialized meteorologists have prepared for the flight route.

He then studies all of that for a while and has access to either the meteorologists or a computer to clear any doubts that might arise.

Then, on board the airplane, besides the weather radar and other weather-related equipment, he has access to updated SIGMETs, METARs, PIREPs and the like.

But, is that the way it is?

We’d love to hear from those of you that know the real thing!

I know you guys are busy and I am asking for more than a couple of seconds this time. But please consider writing a comment here so that the rest of us can get a flare of what the real professional weather briefings are all about.
If you have the time to scan that sort of documentation, I will take care to anonimize it and publish it here so that the rest of us can take a look!

Thanks!

What sort of aviator are you?

I’d like to know who uses Meteo·Mobile.

Why?

First, because we exist because of you.
Also, because we make development decisions based on what we think or users wish. And for this, we use an image of what we think you are.
We used to think you are pilots. BUT we’ve discovered through you feedback that there are plenty of other people using aviador (crew members, virtual pilots, meteorology enthusiasts and teachers, controllers …).

I wish there will be plenty of answers that will help us better develop this tool.

I don’t believe in web polls. But, PLEASE, prove me wrong and answer the poll. It only takes a second.

You’ll find the poll on the right sidebar. Just click on the answer that best describes you. After that, you’ll get the poll results.