Home - VulcanAnalytics/Aero-Met GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the Aero Met wiki!

What is Aero Met?

T.L.D.R.

• A source of aviation weather such as METARs and ATIS.
• Community weather sourcing.
• Bringing professional weather sharing to small aerodromes.

The Concept

If you head over to any app store you'll find several excellent aviation apps which provide up-to-date weather information. But they all suffer from the same problem, they only provide you METAR (and TAF) weather submitted on the AFTN system. Every weather app is missing a large number of the aerodromes which don't publish their weather this way, and not all of them are small aerodromes.

Submitting weather on the AFTN network can be very expensive, and in a money conscious activity like aviation any money you can save is vital to the success of your aerodrome or club. Lots of aerodromes have found alternatives for informing their users via websites, Twitter, etc, but this leaves information fragmented across many locations and requires up-to-date knowledge of each aerodrome's methods. Not great if you're not local. This information also isn't always as current as it could be because of each aerodrome's priorities. There are also many aerodromes and farm strips that simply don't publish any weather because of the problems setting up any of these methods.

Aero Met aims to provide a solution to these problems by creating;

• a single platform where all weather information can be communicated.
• a network which allows the users of the system to submit weather observations which are available to other users.
• integrations with other systems to remove manual entry and support a single point of entry but keep many systems up-to-date.

Scenarios

The Pilot

With so many aerodromes not providing weather information on the AFTN network where do you go to get the weather? Your favorite traditional app won't help. Each aerodrome has their own, or several solutions which can make it easier or harder to track down. Do you know if they have a website, Twitter account, phone number? As Aero Met grows in it's usage we can provide you with a single location for many of these aerodromes. Get weather updates without having to wait until you're in range of a potentially busy radio frequency. Be more prepared for your flight.

The Farm Strip

If you're running a farm strip with frequent visitors you might want to publish some information about conditions each day without the need to update every 30 minutes. Use Aero Met to submit simple messages like "Ground firm, grass medium length ~ 10cm long". You may have your own weather station, so feel free to submit information from that too.

The Small Aerodrome

You're a small aerodrome with a radio operator with a lot of movements, often the frequency can be busy and anything to offload the requests will help. Submitting current weather via Aero Met allows pilots to establish weather, runway in use, and the current information before first contact and can also give them an idea of the weather without having to ring up a controller when out of radio range.

The larger Aerodrome

You may already provide ATIS weather over a dedicated frequency, telephone line, website, twitter channel, so is this worth it? As this offering grows it may well be, we could become the one place you update to support your website, twitter channel and perhaps other mobile apps as we partner and offer our weather information more widely.

Other Aviation Weather apps

Perhaps you already update your users with information retrieved from NOAA's APIs. As this offering grows we intend to provide APIs for you too, to augment your existing feeds with this new source of weather.

Further info

If you would like to discuss this platform further, if you have any suggestions, ideas, requests for integration, interest in an API, or much more, please get in touch via our email [email protected]