Reading a Metar, part 2

You have a drone, you can take awesome aerial photography and video, now get out there and make some money with it. Join the lifetime course today: LOOK

Taz Christman is the 2018 Flight Instructor of The Year. Click that title and check him out! He presents some of the video you will see in the Remote Pilot Online Course.

Reading a Metar, part 2

The first one here is METAR for Ponca City, Oklahoma. It’s on the fourth day at 17:53 Zulu, winds are Three-Two-Zero at 14 knots, ten statute miles, clear, temperature is Two-One, dew point is Zero-Seven, and the altimeter is Three-Zero-Zero-Three. Here, again, it’s remarks. It’s an automated source type 2, which means it has a precipitation discriminator.

Second one here is METAR for KRCR. That’s Rochester and that’s just south of the home of hogs at Plymouth. And it’s on the fifth day at 19:13 Zulu. It’s an automated source again. Winds are at One-Six-Zero at 9 knots, gusting is 16 knots, 1 ¼ statute miles, with rain and mist, broken at 800 feet, broken at 1400 feet, overcast at 2100 feet.

Here, again, temperature’s Two-One, dew point is Two-Zero, and the altimeter is Two-Nine-Nine-One. Remarks here again, it’s an automated source type 2. Third one we’ve got is a METAR for Warsaw, Indiana, just to the west of the home of hogs. And you’ve got on the fourth day at 19:56 Zulu, automated, winds are Three-One-Zero at 16, gusting at 30 knots, 10 statute miles, few at 1400 feet, overcast at 2100 feet. Temperature is One-Two, dew point is Zero-Nine, and the altimeter is 2936.

The remarks on this one, it’s an automated source type 2 again. This time, they’ve got a little few more notes in it for us. So we’ve got a peak wind from Three-Zero-Zero at 30 knots, at 19:51 Zulu, just right before this report came out. Then, it talks about thunderstorms (TS), ended at Zero-Five past the hour.

Reading a Metar, part 2

And, then, rain ended at 18 past the hour. One of the other sources of weather I like to look as is a good website: aviationweather.gov. This picture right here is from aviationweather.gov.

What I like about this one is that you can bring up this little section here and, basically, just take your little cursor, and you just run it over the top of whatever airport you’re looking at, and it’s going to pop up the METAR. It’ll do it either in the un-coded format right here like you see, or it’ll actually decode it for you too.

If it has something in it that you’re not sure what it’s saying, you can decode it and actually look and see what it is. Some of the cool things I like about this is, right off the bat, I can kind of look at it and, if it’s green, I know it’s VFR. If I see blues, which I don’t see them on this one. On the next slide I’m going to show, it’s got a bunch of blues and reds, so we’ll see these. But these greens are showing you that it’s VFRs.

So I can kind of see that right away. It also gives you your wind, so I know in this case here over at Rensselaer, Indiana, the winds are out of the northeast at five knots. That little half-barb up there is five knots. I don’t see any full-barb, so it looks like all the winds around here are pretty calm.

They’re only about five knots. At Midway, you can see this guy up here, he’s got the full-barb, that’s ten knots. So Midway’s got ten knots out of the east up here. On this one here, since we’ve got the hurricane going on down in Florida, I figured this was an appropriate time to look at some of the METARs down there.

So this is for Tampa down in here. In this case, it’s red. That means it’s IFR, so obviously what’s going on down there, we don’t really want to be flying down there in the hurricane. But it’ll roll over this and you can see all the different winds here. One of the things to note that I really like about this page is, on the last graphic, we had green little dots that shows VFR.

The blue dots here mean it’s marginal VFR. Then, the red dots mean it’s IFR. So I can see right away kind of what kind of conditions I’d be getting into. The other thing I like is all these little red, so you get the wind barbs here again, but the red actually indicates that it’s a gust.

So, if you see the winds out here, if you’ve got a little pin it, the pin it means that it’s 50 knots. Then, you’ve got a little black barb right underneath there. That’s 55 knots. You’ve got a little half-barb, and a full-barb, and half-barb.

So it’s gusting pretty good up there. You’ve got 55 knots gusting to 75 knots right on that little barb right in there, so that’s some pretty good winds. You can see some of these up here. Here’s 20 knots gusting to 40 up there. All kinds of different stuff. I can see this right away and just know that is some nasty crap going on down there.

Reading a Metar, part 2

On the next page here, this is from 1800wxbrief.com. One of the things I like about this is you can do an area brief, and it’ll give you all the same type of stuff that aviationweather.gov gave you, but it gives this little graphic over here as well. It actually puts in some radar.

In this case, you can actually see the hurricane as it’s coming around. It gives you the same type of dots. Usually, the reds in here are IFR and it’s got some pinks up here, kind of like a purplish color, is usually your marginal VFR.

Then, you’ve got greens and blues as well. One of the things I really like about this is, here’s Tampa, some kind of cool stuff in here. So here’s Tampa on the 11th day of September, 02:53 Zulu, it’s an automated source, winds are Three-Six-Zero at 36 gusting to 46, 2 statute miles, heavy rain, mist, broken at 1200, overcast at 1800.

Temperature’s Two-Four, dew point’s Two-Three, altimeter is 2897 with the remarks here, again, automated source type 2, which means it has a precipitation discriminator. And, then, it’s got the peak winds Three-Six-Zero at 53, at Zero-Two 33, so just about 20 minutes before this report was taken.

Then, it’s got a bunch of this other stuff out here. Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to understand what they’ve got. Some of it’s not necessarily meant for pilots, some of it’s for weather forecasters, and observers, and stuff like that. But if you really wanted to know what this is, this website actually has a pretty good little feature. If you go up here in the top left, you can see it says Plain Text.

If I click that, what’s going to happen is it’s actually going to decode it all for me. So all those that did have the shorthand text now has the full-up text. Obviously, everything I read to you before is still in there, remarks, all that kind of stuff. Now, let’s get down here. Here’s your remarks.

Automated source type 2, precipitation discriminator, peak winds Three-Six-Zero at 53 knots, 02:33 Zulu. Now, it’s getting to the part that was kind of hard to decipher. Pressure falling rapidly. Sea-level pressure at 1080.9 hectopascals, .57 inch of precipitation in the past hour, 1.74 inch of precipitation in the past three hours, hourly temp is 23.9 degrees Celsius, dew point is 22.83 degrees Celsius.

Three-hour atmospheric pressure steady or increasing, then decreasing, or decreasing, then decreasing more rapidly by 10.8 hectopascals. And, then, you’ve got the little dollar sign there, which just means that there’s some kind of maintenance that needs to be done to that station.

Well, no kidding. They got a hurricane going in there, so I’m betting there’s probably something that needs to be fixed on that. But like I said, the nice thing about this website is it does give you the chance to decipher what some of those remarks are. In this case, there’s some kind of interesting information to know, especially when down there, for all of us that like to fly and the weather might be something to kind of go look at, and just kind of look around, and figure out what some of these METARs mean.

Reading a Metar, part 2

Are you ready to get the Remote Pilot Rating and start making money with your drone?

We are here to help with lifetime access to our video course. Get in on a special lifetime rate today with this link: CLICK HERE

• You will have to renew the license every 2 years, which is why we made the membership lifetime. You will have to brush up for the retest.
• We have actual FAA questions at the end of the course to help you prepare.
• Remote Pilot Online is staffed weekdays from 8am-4pm EDT for customer support and questions.
• When you enroll, you are not charged for a full 24hrs. During this time you have unlimited access to the entire course. If you feel it is not for you, simply go into your settings and remove your card to cancel.

Course Inventory

Gary Cleveland, Chief Pilot

Remote Pilot Online

FAA Safety Representatives

[email protected]

574-767-1797