American flight instructor here, yeah we use statute miles for visibility, nautical miles for distance and knots for speed, feet in altitude, celsius for temperature and dewpoint and inches of mercury for barometric pressure.
METARs will report up to 10 statute miles visibility. You’ll hear AWOS systems say “Visibility. More than. One. Zero.” in their sound board kind of way. 6SM is on the chart and surprisingly clear for a freezing torcano.
Missing from this METAR are cloud coverage and heights. Should be something like BKN005 OVC008 for the weather it’s reporting, that would be broken clouds at 500 feet AGL and overcast at 800 feet AGL. I figure if we’ve got volcnadoes going.
Also missing is the temperature and dewpoint report, which both read in degrees celsius as two digits each with a slash in between. So there should be a section that looks like “…+BLUP NOSIG BKN005 OVC008 18/17 A3808…” I figure to have broken clouds at 500 feet the dewpoint has to be one degree below the ambient temperature.
I’ve never seen an altimeter setting that high, a “standard day” is 29.92 in. Hg. What the hell would have pushed 7.1 inches of mercury up the barometer? The tsunami that accompanied the erupting volcano washing ashore and inundating the AWOS machine?
A02 or A01 is, as far as I know, appended to every METAR that is generated by an ASOS or AWOS machine. That mark will be missing if it was generated by a human, say at a larger airport that has an ATIS system.
“NOSIG” should be in the Remarks section AFAIK, and I’ve never seen an automated system generate forecast information like that.
American flight instructor here, yeah we use statute miles for visibility, nautical miles for distance and knots for speed, feet in altitude, celsius for temperature and dewpoint and inches of mercury for barometric pressure.
METARs will report up to 10 statute miles visibility. You’ll hear AWOS systems say “Visibility. More than. One. Zero.” in their sound board kind of way. 6SM is on the chart and surprisingly clear for a freezing torcano.
Missing from this METAR are cloud coverage and heights. Should be something like BKN005 OVC008 for the weather it’s reporting, that would be broken clouds at 500 feet AGL and overcast at 800 feet AGL. I figure if we’ve got volcnadoes going.
Also missing is the temperature and dewpoint report, which both read in degrees celsius as two digits each with a slash in between. So there should be a section that looks like “…+BLUP NOSIG BKN005 OVC008 18/17 A3808…” I figure to have broken clouds at 500 feet the dewpoint has to be one degree below the ambient temperature.
I’ve never seen an altimeter setting that high, a “standard day” is 29.92 in. Hg. What the hell would have pushed 7.1 inches of mercury up the barometer? The tsunami that accompanied the erupting volcano washing ashore and inundating the AWOS machine?
A02 or A01 is, as far as I know, appended to every METAR that is generated by an ASOS or AWOS machine. That mark will be missing if it was generated by a human, say at a larger airport that has an ATIS system.
“NOSIG” should be in the Remarks section AFAIK, and I’ve never seen an automated system generate forecast information like that.