Metar

Description

METAR reports are meteorogical weather reports for aviation. Metar is a small program which downloads weather reports for user-specfied stations and optionally decodes them into a human-readable format.

This package is particularly useful is you want to quickly find out what the weather is like in places all over the world and you do not need fancy GUIs.

Currently, metar supports decoding date/time, wind, visibility, cloud layers, temperature and air pressure. Observations, such as rain, fog, etc. are still under progress. Also, more work in the area of clouds need to be done, as support for Cumulus or Cumulunimbus is not yet decoded.

A typical output looks like:

EHGR 151025Z 21009KT 9999 FEW130 SCT150 BKN170 04/00 Q1021 BLU BLU

When decoding is switched on, the following additional output will be generated:

Station: EHGR
Day: 15
Time: 1025 UTC
Wind direction: 210
Wind stength: 9 KT
Wind gust: 9 KT
Visibility: 9999 M
Cloud coverage FEW at 13000 ft.
Cloud coverage SCT at 15000 ft.
Cloud coverage BKN at 17000 ft.
Temperature: 4 C
Dewpoint: 0 C
Pressure: 1021 hPa

License

metar is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

News

By popular demand, I created a metar rpm
package. The package has not been tested!

Downloads

For downloads, please visit the metar download page.

State

metar has been officially released on 3 jan 2005, and was uploaded to the Debian archives on that date. The package name is "metar". It is available in Debian unstable.

Building metar on FreeBSD

To build metar on FreeBSD, follow the following steps:

1. Install curl
   As root, execute the command pkg_add -r curl
2. Get the metar source code tarball, and unpack it
3. Change into the source directory, and give the following command:
   
   CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib ./configure
4. Build the sources with the 'make' command. The binary will be in available as src/metar.

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