This site is designed to be used for quick analysis of trends in the weather. It allows the user to pull the past 1 to 12 hours of METAR reports from any station that is reported to the Aviation Weather Center. It was built as a quick way for HAA pilots to wake up for a flight and get a quick idea of what's been happening with the weather lately. It is a tool to help determine whether the weather has been bouncing around your personal minimums. That being said, its features may be useful to other pilots in other roles and aircraft. It is meant to be just a part of the pilot's regular weather check, and is not intended to replace a proper briefing and personal analysis of the weather.
While the site was designed with US-based airports in mind, it can pull data from any airport that reports METARs to AWC. I have tried to make it simple to use.
If you are looking for an airport based in the United States, you do not need to put the leading "K", the script will add that for you. The leading "K" is, however, required for the AWC to recognize the airport. To clarify, if you are looking for weather at an airport such as E16 - which does not have a leading K - you may type in either "E16" or "KE16". The website will add a K to all 3-letter entries automatically. If you're looking for weather at an airport outside the US which reports weather to aviationweather.gov, you must input all 4 characters of the airport's ID.
The default view is on the raw text of the METARs with the station, observation time, and "AUTO" removed. They are color coded according to flight category with yellow indicating unknown. This is typically due to some data being missing from the report, and the AWC server was unable to make a determination on its flight category. In the future, I do plan on implementing logic that will search for conditions that would make the field IFR and color it accordingly.
If you select the Graphs tab you will be presented with a visual depiction of ceiling and visibility over the requested time period. As of right now, the ceiling graph stops at 5000' and the visibility graph stops at 10 miles. Each background is color coded according to flight condition for the given time period. For values above the maximum on the graphs, the line goes over the top of the chart and disappears. For values reported to be exactly at the top of the graph the line is still visible. Values that are missing from that report period are currently treated as clear, however this may change.
The horizontal lines denote the value stated at the left side of the chart, and the vertical lines represent time. Each line represents 1 hour and is labeled accordingly.
New Feature!
Now you can mouse over the graph and get a readout that follows the mouse, indicating the values reported at the time the mouse is over. This is the first iteration of this feature, and I do expect to make it prettier.
To add favorites, enter them into the text box and click "Set Favorites". They will appear below the button with checkboxes next to them. By selecting one or more favorites, you can either remove them from your favorites list with the "Delete Selected Favorites" button, or include them in the search by getting data as normal. The site will check for any checked boxes when you request data, you do not need to include them in the search box if they're checked in the favorites box.
Do not use this as your sole source of decision-making weather information. This site is designed to make weather trends easy to visualize, but is not intended to replace the rest of your flight planning requirements. Again, the intent of this site is to help you determine whether conditions have been bouncing around your personal minimums recently. Perhaps somewhere down the line I will remove this part if/when the site becomes more of a centralized source of weather information, but for now it will remain here.
This site is something I do as a hobby, I am not a professional web developer. If you find issues, please email [email protected] with detailed information on what you were doing and what happened, as well as device and browser information (ie. what device were you using, what OS version, what browser, what browser version, etc).
If you'd like to donate to the cause, it will help with the development and hosting costs. Thanks for checking out the site!