As a student pilot, I have to learn to interpret the horrible METAR weather reports. Any pilots out there know exactly what I mean.
METAR is a format for encoding weather conditions, and it's mostly used for aviation weather reports.
Take this for example, from a local weather station:
KCAK 121951Z 18010KT 10SM SCT070 31/18 A2998 RMK AO2 SLP142 T03110178
Encoded in this nasty looking block of text are things such as wind direction and speed, visibility, and cloud coverage.
To help myself learn how to read these things, I figured that if I could make a computer understand it thenI would end up understanding it in the process. I wrote a simple web application that grabs the weather report from a station, and prints out a plain English interpretation.
Here is the interpretation of the above:
Latest data from station KCAK on day 12, at 19:51 Zulu (15:51 ET).
Wind is from the S (180 deg) at 10kt.
Visibility is 10 statute miles.
Scattered clouds (3-4 oktas) at 7000 ft AGL.
Temperature is 31 C (87.8 F), and the dewpoint is 18 C (64.4 F).
Altimeter setting is 29.98 inHg (1015 hPa).
If you want to try it out, go to http://metar.youkaicountry.com/kcak/
Replace kcak with the identifier for a weather station to get data from that station! Unfortunately it doesn't always gracefully handle non-US stations yet, but I'm working on that!