NAME¶
metar - A METAR downloader/decoder
SYNOPSIS¶
metar [-dvh] stations
DESCRIPTION¶
METAR reports are meteorological weather reports for aviation.
metar is a
small program which downloads weather reports for user-specified stations and
optionally decodes them into a human-readable format.
Aviation weather stations are commonly referred to by ICAO designator. The ICAO
is the International Civil Aviation Organization, a international
standardization body for civil organization. For example, KJFK is the ICAO
identifier for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, New York, EHAM is the ICAO
identifier for Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands, etc.
OPTIONS¶
metar requires at least one station identifier to run. A full list of
ICAO stations is available for download at
http://weather.noaa.gov/data/nsd_bbsss.txt.
metar supports three additional options:
- -d Decode the retrieved weather reports into a human-readable
format.
- -v Be verbose while retrieving a report.
- -h Show a short help summary
ENVIRONMENT¶
If the environment variable METARURL is set,
metar will attempt to
download the weather report from that location, rather than from the default
(the NOAA web site). The value of METARURL will be postfixed with the
capitalized station ID, followed by the .TXT extension.
For example, if you have METAR reports in your home directory, setting METARURL
to $HOME and asking for the weather report of ehgr will result in the file
$HOME/EHGR.TXT to be read.
AUTHOR¶
Kees Leune <kees@leune.org>