Wonder what the airlines think?
HD,
Dunno about the airlines, but a pilot recently said to me
'all we look for on the METAR is for an RVR >125M' Ditto the TAF. Don't really care about the rest!'
Actually, I bet he does when it's freezing rain and temps below zero, but most of the time, he's probably right.
How things move on. The rot set in when they removed the cloud type (apart from CB) from the wx about 10 years ago.
We've had automated METAR reporting at our little airfield in Sussex for a few years now. It's automatically fed into the ATIS and an assistant looks out of the window to make sure it makes sense. There are 2 automatic Vaisala weather stations out on the airfield and I must say they are very reliable. My understanding is that Exeter take the most recent 3 METAR when compiling the TAF. The ATC watch manager makes decisions about LVPs and runway direction in use based on the criteria in MATS Pt 2. We seem to have managed pretty well without a Met observer for quite some time - unless someone else is going to say different?
Personally the main use I had for the Met observer was to find out the temp of their deep sensor when making decisions about ant-icing the airfield, but we have our own sensors now.
I know LHR have additional complexities with crosswind and runway in use issues due to the Central Terminal Area. We get the same, of course, with the hangars (Laker's revenge!) but don't have the luxury of another runway to swap over to. We probably get more go-arounds as a result, though, so it's more disruptive.
The wx is... well, whatever it is. If the automatic observations are accurate, I can't see the point of having a locally-based observer. I've always found the aerodromes forecaster at Bracknell/Exeter EXTREMELY helpful, provided you've got the TAF or wx warning in front of you.
Cheers,
The Odd One