meta METAR

Highlight critical conditions in METARs for VFR pilots. This tool does not substitute an official pre-flight weather briefing.

Critical Conditions

1. Visibility below 6000 m (as 5000 m is legal minimum. The weather might drop below at any time)
2. Convective Clouds (CB and TCB, as they can indicate a risk for thunderstorms and wind shears)
3. Critical weather conditions with:

• SH Showers
• TS Thunderstorm
• GR Hail
• GS Small Hail
• BR Mist
• DU Dust
• FG Fog
• FU Smoke
• HZ Haze
• PY Spray
• SA Sand
• VA Volcanic Ash

1. Clouds below 1500 feet (legal limits in most areas)
2. Windspeeds above 12kt (crosswinds of more than 12kt are challenging to fly with small airplanes)

Usage

To get live METAR data, an account and API key from https://www.checkwx.com/ is required.

Use the environment variable M_API_KEY for the checkwx API key.