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ADDS - METARs Help Page (1 of 4)
Back to METARs Page or
METARs help page 2.
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What are METARs?
- The next page
tells more about METARs and how they are presented
on ADDS while the National Weather Service maintains
extensive
documentation on the METAR code format.
The METARs Page contains 3 major sections.
- The first bullet contains a link to another web page containing a
Java Applet which allows users to zoom interactively to the region
of their choosing and to interrogate the station icon for the full
raw METAR text. This has the highest complexity and is therefore
the slowest but is the most valuable if interactive data browsing
is desired.
- The second bullet is an imagemap containing links to GIF images which are
pre-generated and ready for viewing. They are re-created
every hour about 13 minutes past the top of the hour. These plots
depict temperature, dewpoint, wind speed and direction, and any
reported weather conditions (rain, snow, fog, etc.).
Symbols
are used whenever possible to reduce the clutter on the plot.
- The third bullet contains a method for obtaining the latest
surface weather information by accessing raw text METARs. Accessing
raw METARs for specific stations is accomplished using the FORM and
entering the 4-letter ICAO station identifier. This should retrieve
the most recent observation for the requested station(s).
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