Metars & Tafs
September 5, 2010 3 Comments
This weekend i have been refreshing my knowlegde on Metars & Tafs. Whilst in America in 2008 i had been taught how to decode Metars & Tafs, but i needed to refresh my knowledge and it has all slipped back into place.
Here is a Metar of Renton and a TAF of Bristol from earlier on today.
Metar: KRNT 051853Z 18006KT 9SM BKN039 OVC065 16/08 A3016 RMK AO2 SLP219 T01610083
TAF EGGD 051658Z 0518/0618 11013KT 9999 SCT045
TEMPO 0518/0609 8000 PROB30
TEMPO 0518/0607 11015G25KT
TEMPO 0607/0618 11018G28KT
BECMG 0609/0612 7000 RA
TEMPO 0613/0617 4000 +RA PROB30
TEMPO 0614/0618 BKN010
It may seem like a lot of jumbled up letters and numbers, but its actually a vital resource for pilots. I can fully understand Metars, but i am still needing more study on TAFS.
Private Pilot Jordan
A bit cheesey but this might be worth checking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dqFBgUraKQ. But perhaps the best suggestion is simply to check the weather (METARs and TAFs) at a bunch of airports every day until everything is just falling into place. Find three or four airports around the US with different weather patterns (maybe Renton for the METAR, Paine for the TAF in this area, plus another in the mountains and so on). If you take the time to look up any abbreviation you don’t understand then you’ll be up to speed pretty quickly.
And, more generally, watch this: http://www.youtube.com/user/MzeroA#p/u/10/R8UdFupQ3CE. This could be very helpful!
Jordan, it crossed my mind that to increase the value of the blog you might want to not just describe what you were studying but also relay some of the things you have discovered. For example, the weather at Renton, in your example, is from the 5th at 18:53 Zulu, indicates wind from 180 degrees at six knots, with visibility at 9 miles. There’s a broken layer at 3,900 feet and it’s overcast at 6,500 (by the way, Jord, do you know what the official ceiling is with these numbers)? And so on…
Just a thought…