I just downloaded an application called MetarWeather by a company named nirsoft… it can decode Metar data… so I tried to have WD generate a Metar for my station… it appears that it isn’t standard… is there a trick to having WD generate a more standard metar?
Just curious!
BVWD 110430Z 19200KT 29/09 Q1012
From my WD…can your program decode?
What does the metar from your WD look like?
[quote author=NorCal Dan link=topic=10595.msg79397#msg79397 date=1123734965]
From my WD…can your program decode?
I’d like to see what your program says about this metar, if you don’t mind…
KBFW 091315Z AUTO 32004KT 10SM RA SCT024 BKN035 OVC100 18/16 A2998 RMK AO2 P0006 LTG DSNT ALQDS
Dan,
The program is a Free download and it decoded the above as follows:
[quote]==================================================
ICAO : KBFW
Station Name : Silver Bay
Country : US: Minnesota
Location : 47-12N 091-24W
Elevation : 330m
Time : 9 / 13:15Z
Temperature : 18.0
Wow… did WD produce that? That is more in line with what I was hoping for… Heat Index seems to be the only thing missing in that data…
I’m going to be getting the WxSim application for forecasting… and it uses local metar to help it forecast… I thought that maybe I could feed it some nearby WD users personal metar data as well as the larger, ‘official’ metars…
Does WD produce a file that is visible via http for this?
That was an actual metar. Note that not all the decoded information is actually from the metar, location for example. The decode program must look at the station identifier to retrieve that information. I was curious to see how it decoded the rain part of the metar.
You would need more than a vp2 to create a metar like that…
Here is a Metar produced by WD from a La Crosse WS-2310…
METAR KFLJACKS20 111610Z AUTO 32700KT 10.0 SCT 31/25 A3004 RMK A02 SLP172 NOSPECI P0000 T03080247
The output from MetarWeather…
ICAO : KFLJ
Station Name : N/A
Country : N/A
Location : N/A
Elevation : N/A
Time : 8/11/2005 12:10:00 PM
Temperature : 87.4
What information in that Metar data isn’t also available within WD… sky conditions and visibility sure… but I’d think you could either use sky conditions from solar, or borrow those impossible conditional conditions from a local metar…
But other than visibility and sky conditions, what isn’t already available within WD?
The elevation and country and location can all either be entered in the setup… or pulled from places within WD that that information is already entered… such as sun/moon settings…
Maybe I’m missing something, but seems to me all the parts are there, they just need to be pulled together and it would work…
Station Name : N/A
Country : N/A
Location : N/A
Elevation : N/A
where and how does that info go in a metar?
It doesn’t, but I’ve seen at least one PHP METAR decoder (phpweather I think) that has a database of METAR stations that it uses as a lookup.
I downloaded this and set it up w/o an internet connection. The station info was there already so it has to be part of the program. Their history says somthing about 360 new stations added. So I think Chris is correct. See there is an advantage of slow dial-up. --Dave
thats what i thought,…thats its not included
but i could add cloud conditions from your solar sensor 
I guess the only reason this really matters is that I was trying to use a program that reads metar information and uses it for it’s weather analysis… I know another WD user that is just 5 miles from me, yet the nearest metar is about 40 miles from me… if I could use my data along with other metar information for sites near to me, I think I’ll get much better results… I’m talking about WxSim… I thought… Hmmm… WD creates metar data, maybe I can point these apps to that data via http so that it can be used as part of the area weather interpretation… it probably can as it already exists… If there is no way to insert that other data, then I’m barking up the wrong tree… apparently some of that other information is in an official Metar lookup someplace and my personal stations Metar can’t emulate that… Oh well… I’ll take what I can get
Still haven’t heard anybody answer this…
Where is the local metar information stored… I get it emailed to me, but it would be nice if I could get to it via http… does it have a filename?
Where is the local metar information stored.. I get it emailed to me, but it would be nice if I could get to it via http... does it have a filename?
do you mean wd’s metar info?
you should find a file called metar.txt
in the metar folder
That is the one… only thing is now that it seems to exist only in the wdisplay program folder… is there a way to generate that file in a place of my choosing? I’d like it to exist in my htdocs folder so I could access it via http… I will create a scheduled task for now that copies it to that web folder, if puting in code to select where to put it is too much work…
No worries…
Thanks Brian.
Metars sky conditions use a ceilometer or similar equipment to determine cloud heights. You could use the solar to determine cloud cover % and let WD figure cloud height (already does this btw). But visibility…hmmm, thinking to myself…I do have a piece of equipment (see this thread) http://discourse.weather-watch.com/t/10406 that will measure the amount of dust/smoke/whatever in the air. You could do manual estimations (or compare with local metar conditions) to create a table that correlates the amount of crud in the air with expected visibility and then manually enter that into WD daily.
So it could, in theory, be rigged to provide most of the data…
Also, I don’t know why…for some reason my local metar is in the synop directory. When I get home I will look into how I managed to get it there instead of the metar directory…so I assume you can tell WD to store it someplace else…
[quote author=NorCal Dan link=topic=10595.msg79538#msg79538 date=1123810066]
Also, I don’t know why…for some reason my local metar is in the synop directory.
After looking things over I don’t know why my WD produced metar is in the synop directory. If it’s supposed to be in the metar directory with the downloaded metars then I guess something is messed up with my setup.
FWIW my local metar.txt is in my metar directory and my synop directory is empty…
-Bob