What are METARs?
- The next page
tells more about METARs and how they are presented
on ADDS while the National Weather Service maintains
extensive
documentation on the METAR code format.
The METARs Page contains 2 major sections.
- The first bullet is an imagemap containing links to GIF images which are
pre-generated and ready for viewing. The GIF images produced by the
Ceiling and Visibility Analysis Product
are generated every 5 minutes. These images are available for most regions
with a data overlay that depicts temperature, dewpoint, wind speed and direction, and any
reported weather conditions (rain, snow, fog, etc.). They are re-created
every hour about 13 minutes past the top of the hour.
Symbols
are used whenever possible to reduce the clutter on the plot.
- The second bullet contains a method for obtaining the latest
surface weather information by accessing raw text METARs. Accessing
raw METARs for specific stations is accomplished using the FORM and
entering the 4-letter ICAO station identifier. This should retrieve
the most recent observation for the requested station(s).
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