> Best way of finding out what the actual
> weather is like above 900ft would be to
> phone Leeds ATC and ask them.
Which is what I ended up doing.
It does show the limitations of the METAR system though. It's difficult to think of a way of conveying more information without making the character string too long.
It would be nice to always have an overcast level though, if there is one, rather than 3 rather useless layers like in the example.