Unusual METAR
 

FAIRFORD EGVA 021155Z AUTO 06005KT 9999 BKN011 14/12 A3015 RMK AO2 SLP212 70020 T01380124 10139 20111 56003

This contains lots of things I've not seen before. What does 'AUTO' mean ? It was automatically generated ? Can anybody decipher the rest of it ? 'A3015 RMK AO2 SLP212 70020 T01380124 10139 20111 56003' is just gibberish to me....

Metar Decode
 

http://secure.metoffice.com/aviation/metar_decode.jsp

http://secure.metoffice.com/aviation/abbreviations.jsp

AUTO means just that :- A fully automated report with no human intervention.

A3019 means :- If the letter A is used QNH is in inches and hundredths.

I think (hope) you can work out the rest from the links above.

DGG

:ok:

Paul, that is also a military airfield and as such then add a lot of stuff onto it as well. For example the military have a colour coding system to do with what the weather is doing.

....... which is why the link to the met office decoder doesn't help any !!!!!!

So, come on Dave - spill the beans !?

CG

A3015 - Altimeter 30.15 inches...

SLP - Sea Level Pressure (212 is an encode for millibars, but I can't remember how to decode it!)

AUTO - auto observation.

The slightly odd thing about this Metar is that everything after the Altimeter setting (A3015) appears to be in the American format - Fairford is an RAF base right (and not a USAF? - sorry for the ignorance!)?

Try the FMH (ch 12).

RAF Fairford
 

It's an RAF base but the USAF have had a presence at Fairford for a good few years!

A quick trip to Wikipedia reveals....

Spru!

Fairford is currently a USAF base.

Hence the USAF Metar.

At last! a chance to use my 5 years studying meteorology at grad school in the US:

FAIRFORD EGVA 021155Z AUTO 06005KT 9999 BKN011 14/12
You should be familiar with that bit

A3015 - Altimeter setting in inches of mercury 30.12

RMK AO2 - Remarks: its a automatic weather station (ASOS) with a precipitation measurer

SLP212 - Sea level pressure in mb: 1021.2

(the next bits look exciting but are only really for weather anoraks)

70020 - 24 hour precipitation amount (thats what the leading 7 signifies), in this case 0.20 inches.

T01380124 - Hourly temperature and dewpoint in tenths of degrees C. in this case T=+13.8C and Td=+12.4C. The Zero leading indicates they are both above freezing (i.e. T and Td of minus 5 would be T10501050).

10139 - Six hour maximum temperature in degrees C (signified by leading '1'), using the same convention as above, this case is +13.9C

20111 - Six hour minimum temperature in degrees C (signified by leading '2'), using the same convention as above, this case is +11.1C

56003 - Three hourly pressure tendency (signified by leading '5') the first number is the character of the change, '6' means lower than 3 hours ago, but is decreasing more slowly with time (or was decreasing and now steady). '003' means it has decreased by 0.03mb.

As I said these are for the anoraks, and all but the most hardcore have to look them up (I cheated on the final one there!). It really doesn't help with all the mixed units of measurement, but what can you do? There's a couple of 'exciting' webpages you can use as reference:

http://www.met.tamu.edu/class/METAR/quick-metar.html

Cheers,

Gareth.

Good Work!
 

Great post there GFunc!

Nice explanations!

:ok:

My God, in a country as small as ours surely, for VFR, it's easier to just look at the BBC weather site. Lovely radar pics and forecast for next 24hrs....

Or am I being anti-Luddite...?

I am starting to think Jeremy Clarkson was right.... :)

Won't be long before winter sets in, and we have contaminated runway reports in METARs, for anyone who wants to get the text books out early and swot up on those too!

By the way, "AUTO" means an automated report, as others have said. Also worth mentioning, though, that "AUTO" can come with other codes you wouldn't see if a human observer had generated the report, e.g. NDC (nill cloud detected), or NDV (non-directional visibility - the visibility has been detected automatically, but unlike a human observer who would check for variations in visibility in different directions, the automated observation makes no observation on what direction this visibility relates to)....

Sorry. I'll get my anorak and leave.....

FFF
----------------

I was thinking the exact same thing :D

Not fair! The extra groups in a METAR are included for the benefit of meteorologists, not pilots. Clarkson hasn't had a go at met men yet -- come to think of it, he's unlikely to do so, since he has little reason to envy them while he sits in his supercars dealing with traffic jams and speed limits.

Exactly. Anything after RMK is essentially info for other Met Men and not of any real use to pilots which is why I ignore them and never bothered to learn the de-code in the first place.