Meteo·Mobile Blog

The Blog for Mobile Aviation Weather for smartphones

Tag Archives: taf

Multiple Metar and Taf easier than ever

We’ve just uploaded a new improvement based on user suggestions.

Some of you had said that you needed a low bandwidth mode to get METAR and TAF reports.
Also, some had asked to be able to get METARs and TAFs for multiple airports on a single shot.

Our initial design was thought in two ways:

  1. Pilots need to know what the weather will be at the destination
    Meteo·Mobile lists the destination weather reports and those for the nearby airports.
  2. Pilots want to know what the weather is like en-route (surface level)
    Meteo·Mobile has the Metar en-route form which will get you all the METARs or TAFs for the route you design

Some pilots, though, just want to know what the weather is like at multiple airports but don’t neet to know what the enroute METARs look like. This would be the case if you’re choosing where you’ll get the 100$ burger today, based on destination weather, for instance.

Also, some users had complained that they were getting too much traffic for their handhelds.

For all of you, we have just deployed a new form to get just that: multiple METAR and TAF reports, period. This is the lowest bandwidth possible weather report.

Give it t try at the new multiple airport metar form

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.

Metar

When you ask for a Metar, this is what you get:

metar

Above we can see the Metar itself with a couple of things that help better check that we’ve gotten what we were asking for. Name it the Date and age of the weather report. Also , if the weather report is ‘old’ we will get a red warning stating so.

Next, we get a series of links to get other Wx reports. You can get the Metar, the last 4 Metars, the Taf, All of the previous, or you can also ask for the Navigation info only.

Next, we’ll get the station’s information tha you can see here:

  • Station name and country
  • Current UTC time
  • ICAO and IATA designator for the airport
  • Links too the map and kml of the airport
  • GPS coordinates
  • Sunrise and Sunset times


Next, we’ll get the ‘Extra information‘. This a spaced reserved for pilot input; that’s where we hope that in the future you’ll find the other pilot’s advice on what to do when you go there. Anyone can use the Share your POI’s link to send us information (POI stands for Point Of Interest).
You can use that to send us:

  • Your club’s web site
  • Your favorite local FBO
  • Your local webcam

Here we have a link to all of the weather charts that include this particular airport and the Geographic information:

  • A Google map
  • A list of the nearby alternates (5 unless you specify differently in your settings)
    For each alternate you get it’s ICAO designator, the distance and true course FROM this airport.
    Also the type of alternates that you get depend on your settings. There, you can choose whether you want to see any airport or only those with weather information.

Now look at the alternate’s names.
You’ll see some are in lower case, those don’t have METAR reports. The ones in UPPER CASE do have METAR reports. And the ones underlined have extra information (supplied by other pilots).

And finally you get a form to ask for another Metar for another aiport.