metar (1)

metar [-dvh] stations

\s-1METAR\s0 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 \s-1ICAO\s0 designator. The \s-1ICAO\s0 is the International Civil Aviation Organization, a international standardization body for civil organization. For example, \s-1KJFK\s0 is the \s-1ICAO\s0 identifier for John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, New York, \s-1EHAM\s0 is the \s-1ICAO\s0 identifier for Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, The Netherlands, etc.

metar requires at least one station identifier to run. A full list of \s-1ICAO\s0 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

If the environment variable \s-1METARURL\s0 is set, metar will attempt to download the weather report from that location, rather than from the default (the \s-1NOAA\s0 web site). The value of \s-1METARURL\s0 will be postfixed with the capitalized station \s-1ID\s0, followed by the .TXT extension. For example, if you have \s-1METAR\s0 reports in your home directory, setting \s-1METARURL\s0 to $HOME and asking for the weather report of ehgr will result in the file $HOME/EHGR.TXT to be read.

Kees Leune <[email protected]>