We’ve just deployed a new compression algortithm that greatly improves page load time.

You should feel that Metars and Tafs and maps load a lot faster now.
Also, cost will be greatly reduced for those that pay per traffic.

We’ve included a link to AIRNAV’s airport information for all US airports (AIRNAV doesn’t cover much of the rest of the World)
You’ll find the link in the Extra Information Section, just below the weather report for each airport.

We’ve done this following Chris’s suggestion. Thank you, Chris.

What will you find when you follow the link?

Among other, information on the airport’s:

• Operations
• Communications
• Navaids
• Services (fuel…)
• Runways
• Ownership and management
• Operation statistics
• Instrument procedures and plates
• FBO
• Nearby hotels and car rental

We’ve added a new feature to the .

The icons are as follows:

• VFR flying conditions
• Marginal VFR flying conditions
• IFR flying conditions
• Limited IFR flying conditions

How do you see these maps?

On the Airport Information section of every METAR page, you have the airport’s ICAO and IATA codes, the current time, its coordinates (with a link to the map), its Sunrise and Sunset times. Just below this information you have a Google map showing a satellite image of the airport (except for US users who get the SkyVector version)

Clicking on the Google map will take you to a bigger map showing the nearby alternates, now with color coded icons.
US visitors will have to use the map link  below the ICAO and IATA codes, or click on the coordinates of the airport in the same section.

We sure hope you’ll enjoy this improvement and, again, want to THANK all of  YOU for visiting us, and specially those that send us suggestions (through comments on this blog or the FeedBack form)

Nowadays, with the technology available, I find it hard to believe how many METARs are still wrongly time-stamped.

Lately I’ve been following this issue. Little mistakes made when coding the time-stamp for the METAR render it useless…
Sometimes just after a date change, the weather observer uses the previous date number. Other times, an additional number slips into the date. Sometimes, I guess the weather observer just uses local time instead of UTC time.

The fact is that every day there are a few dozens of METARs that aren’t time-stamped right.

There is little we can do to help solve this issue, except for publishing it here.

I suppose the program that weather observers use to code the METAR isn’t prepared to trap those mistakes. I haven’t had the chance to check whether some country escapes from this type of error…

Are you a weather observer? Please, drop us a comment on this.

Here are some examples taken out of the last couple of days:

We’ve decided to discontinue advertising on mobile devices (whose user-agent shows midp).

With revenues shrinking more and more, it doesn’t make sense anymore to take your space and bandwidth.

Not that the revenue from the other adds is great, but it does helps pay the costs of hosting. And we have a good, expensive hosting because that’s the only way we pilots can get a fast aviation weather report.

We would really like to hear from you on this whole advertising matter.
We understand that you pilots don’t like seeing advertising (specially on some advanced mobile devices which show even the bigger adds) But I’m sure you do understand that hosting needs to get paid for.

I’d be glad to debate about other options and opinions. Do you have any great ideas? Share them with us!

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

I’ve recently updated the software in my blackberry and found out that they’ve implemented an improvement long wished for.

Now, when you click on a kml link, google maps for mobile opens showing the information contained in that kml file.

What this means to Meteo·Mobile users is that they no longer need to copy the kml link, open google maps, paste the link and wait.
Now, just clicking on the kml link will take care of all of that, automatically opening the google maps application.

Thus, I’ve updated the link and called it ‘mobile map’ instead of ‘kml’

I have not had the chance to check if this behavior is analogous in iPhone or other sort of handhelds, so feedback will be appreciated.

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 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

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 )
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

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.