NOAA METAR Microsummary home

Introduction

Microsummaries are a new "Web 2-dot-O-M-G" way of summarizing webpages to display specific information from webpages that people are interested in.

Also sometimes called "LiveBookmarks," common examples of the new technology include displaying The Word of the Day," the stock price of a particular company, or the current price or closing time on an eBay auction.

These actually aren't examples; you can head on over to Myk Melez's Microsummary Generators page to download these "examples."

METAR Microsummaries?

After playing around with a couple of microsummaries, I begin thinking about data that I really cared about that might be microsummarizable (is that a word?).

As a private pilot, data of common interest to me, even if I'm not planning on flying is the METAR report for my home airport. On days that I'm planning to fly, this data is of special interest and importance to me.

I decided to start working on a microsummary to get METAR data from the most official source I could find. If you search Google for "metar," NOAA comes up as the first link. That works for me.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's an example of METAR Microsummaries from some of my favorite airports:

What you get and what you don't

Every pilot knows that METAR strings can get pretty long. In the interest of showing the most important information in the summary, the NOAA METAR Microsummary generator:

  1. Strips off the time of the report; this can be misleading, especially for SPECI reports and reports which were the last report from a closed control tower.
  2. Prettifies the wind data; we all remember it's all in knots, right?
  3. Shows the current sky conditions, but...
  4. Stops there. For all other data, including temperature/dewpoint, remarks, etc., you'll have to go read the METAR report itself. Fortunately, microsummaries are bookmarks, right? So just click the link to see the entire report. Spiffy, no?

The reasoning behind the above formatting rules are that the microsummary is biasing towards giving quick information to the VFR pilot. VFR pilots are most interested in the current winds, the visbility, the obstructions to visibility (if any), and the lowest cloud layer/ceiling. Given these particular interests of VFR pilots, the microsummary attempts to display this information in the most concise form possible, in an attempt to save toolbar real estate.1

This microsummary updates itself every half hour.

Sign me up!

To setup a microsummary and get instant weather on airports you care about:

  1. Get Firefox if you don't already have it. You'll need the new 2.0 version.
  2. Download/install the NOAA METAR Microsummary. This process should be automatic.
  3. Restart your browser.

Now you're almost ready to go! The last step is to bookmark the NOAA METAR page that hosts the data for the airport you're interested in. Unfortunately, you must bookmark the right form of the page.2 You can do so below.

Enter the three-letter ICAO Code for the airport:   

Once on the page, bookmark it as normal. Note that the Name field in the Add Bookmark dialog window is a menu; you select the microsummary format from that menu, and you're done!

For an example of what this user interface looks like, I recommend taking a quick glance at the Using Microsummaries page on wiki.mozilla.org.

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1 There is some room for improvement here; planned development includes removing the "SM" from the visibility and preceding the visiblity with a v, i.e. "10SM" becomes "v10." I also want to strip all the various cloud layers off, and just present the lowest layer.
2 For those interested, an HTTP GET, not a POST; microsummaries can't (yet?) use a POST to get their data. Unfortunately, NOAA's entry page into their METAR data uses a POST, so this microsummary will not work by going directly to NOAA's site.