Interpretation of METAR data

Archive Archived Weather Display Usage Questions
1

Hi,

Does anyone have any documentation or know of any good website that can tell me how to interpret METAR data.

Specifically I am trying to figure out what the full list of possible results could be for the following:

Weather: light rain

What are all the possible combinations? I have seen ‘light rain’ and just ‘rain’. But there are probably more, like ‘heavy rain’ etc. What about storms etc?

The metar data for that entry is: FAEL 051030Z 23010KT 4000N -RA BKN006 BKN100 20/18 Q1019

Thanks for the help!
Craig

2

http://www.met.tamu.edu/class/METAR/quick-metar.html has a quick overview (and I think a more detailed reference elsewhere on the site)

3

http://metar.noaa.gov/

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lzk/html/metar.htm

http://weather.cod.edu/notes/metar.html

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml

Lots of sources on METAR decoding… good question though!