Meteo·Mobile Blog

The Blog for Mobile Aviation Weather for smartphones

Tag Archives: weather report

Year 2000 effect… 9 years later

For a couple of hours today, Meteo·Mobile has suffered kind of a year 2000 year 2009 effect.

With the change of the year, the algorithms that calculate whether there are new weather reports available have gone crazy.

We are very sorry for those of you who may have encountered this problem.
We’ve worked hard to fix it as soon as possible.
We’re confident the problem is fixed already.

The good side of things is that the algorithm that watches whether the information supplied is current has proved useful.
This algorithm provides another weather reports source if it finds that the weather report shown is too old.
If that is the case, a red message warns the pilot. Next to it, a question mark(‘?’) link provides a link to an additional weather reports source when pressed.

We hope the impact of this issue has been minimal, and…

WISH ALL PILOTS THE HAPPIEST 2009 FULL OF CAVOKs.

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.