Free "METAR" and "TAF" for every airport

I‘ve just requested they add ESKC. It falls in the same category as LSZK…. no official METAR but wx available via OpenWeatherMap…. so I would hope they will add it.

ESKC is reported in airport weather.com

That’s not new. There’s an app called AeroWeather that does that for free. I use it all the time, it’s quicker than opening ForeFlight.

I think it is new, actually.
And even if otherwise, many “already existing” things are (re-)done and then take over the market. Someome said, quite understandable, “You wann do bikes for kids, no way, plenty of kid’s bikes already exist”, and then this happened.

I believe a few posters here are misunderstanding what @airborne_again meant.

This new service isn’t (only) about official METAR data, but also publishes their own weather reports for airports lacking METAR/TAF information?!

AW-METAR
Most airports don’t have a METAR station. If a METAR is not available, ‘AW-METAR’ weather information provided by Meandair shows the up-to-date weather situation. The weather information presented as AW-METAR is similar to the METAR as regulated by the World Meteorological Organization. Meandair determines the weather situation using many weather data sources, resulting in high quality and up-to-date weather information. With AirportWeather.com pilots and other users have accurate actual weather information available for airports with and without a METAR station.

WHY ARE METAR AND AW-METAR DIFFERENT?
METARs are typically updated and issued every hour. AW-METAR is updated every 15 minutes with the most recent weather data available from many sources.

Airborne_Again wrote:

What do you make of this?

Hmmmm.

So they create auto-metars and Auto-TAFs for airports where there are no observers (obviously) and nobody to verify the results.

Do they have sensors? Where are those data coming from? Wind, QNH, TT/TdTd? Those are usually hard mesured data.
Clouds? How do they measure them? Visibility?

I have to say I wonder about the implications if someone creates this kind of messages and distributes them. Honest answer? I don’t know off hand if that is “allowed” or even “appropriate” but from what I know, messages like this usually are generated by state met authorities, not private entities.

I very quickly had a look at some of those messages and actually tried an analysis but then I see that they even produce their own Auto-Metars and TAFs for airports which do have official ones, and they differ massively. You don’t need me to analyze this, just grab the TAF or METAR for a known station and compare. The differences are quite severe. Also there are parameters which would not be used like they use them (e.g. cloud cover is not indicated above MSA, they however do indicate them well above, in TAF’s I found FM groups outside the validity of the TAF and so on. FM groups are also not used in Europe, for starters.

So no idea who is behind this and what the idea is, but whatever this may be intended for, I hope nobody uses this for flight planning.

I just timed myself and it takes me 20 seconds on Foreflight to get the METAR or TAF for any airport worldwide on Foreflight, including pulling the phone from my pocket. You can also access daily weather which provides an hourly forecast for the area of the airport a couple of weeks in advance, which is particularly interesting if the airport doesn’t report METARs or AWOS. I have no idea of the source for the latter. I’ve been doing this several times a day now for years, maybe my thumb works extra quickly. It’s not ‘free’ but since I don’t fly without FF for other reasons, it’s no additional cost to me.

20 seconds on Foreflight

Probably, and good for you.
An easy guess is that the vast majority of posters or lurkers on EuroGA are located… in Europe. And another guess is that of those only a small minority is hooked on the American Foreflight.

Almost certainly due to paid version

Again, thanks for the hint @chflyer. Funnily enough as I’ve been using the app probably since its inception, and quite a lot on the line during Winter ops for deciphering those pesky SNOWTAMs and RWY reports, but never noticed you could change from RH to LH seat, talk about non-intrusive advertising
Subscribed now since AeroWeather is definitely a very clever piece of kit, and provides far more than weather.

Dan wrote:

An easy guess is that the vast majority of posters or lurkers on EuroGA are located… in Europe.

What difference does it make where you’re located? As mentioned and demonstrated FF supplies available weather data on your phone for airports worldwide, in seconds. And has done for I’m guessing 15 years or more – my use of FF only goes back about that far.

My initial reaction to this thread was to question whether I was missing some subtlety in the topic, because I can hardly remember a time when I didn’t get aviation weather data quickly on my phone or tablet as a routine part of preparing for a flight. The only subtlety that was apparent is that it needs to be “free”, the definition of which is I guess open to interpretation: entirely free, or free because its bundled with something else you use and need anyway are two different versions of ‘free’.