Kautz Creek on the southwestern side of Mt. Rainier







When I started my private pilot license training, I was introduced to a thing called a METAR, which means an "Aviation Weather Routine" (How that = METAR is beyond me). A great majority of airports get weather information for their pilots and most issue a text report, known as a METAR. METARs may look like a foreign language when an untrained eye looks at them, but once you understand how a METAR works, you open a weath of information. Many commercial sites, like weather.com and wunderground.com actually use METARs behind the scenes in their real-time weather reports.

Once you take a METAR and convert it into its basic parts, you have the following things: Time of report, wind speeds and direction, lateral visbility on the ground, weather and obscurations, cloud activity, pressure settings, and temperature and dewpoint settings. There is also a section for remarks, which can include verything from towering cumulonimubs seen in the east to reporting that a station requires maintenance.

Now that you have a little history on the METAR, you can use this nifty form below to get a METAR from the National Weater Service and see realtime info. Also, I have a neat section here about Tornados in a METAR Report.



Airport: (Type aiport identifer, ie, KALO, KCID, KCCY, etc...)



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 Daniel Ernstes (80.146.107.98)
 Sunday, July 20, 2003, 3:32:49 PM

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 Zombie (193.110.57.198)
 Thursday, December 4, 2003, 4:15:01 AM

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 Daniel Ernstes (80.146.126.156)
 Thursday, January 1, 2004, 3:26:25 PM

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"It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself"

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