METAR Decoder: TAF Weather

Read any raw aviation weather report in plain English, in about five seconds.

Paste a METAR or a TAF, or pull the current report for any airport, and every single group is written out in words: the wind, the visibility, the runway visual range, every cloud layer, the weather codes, the temperature and dew point, the altimeter setting, and the remarks section that most tools quietly skip.

DECODES THE REMARKS, NOT JUST THE BODY

The RMK section is where the useful detail hides, and it is the part almost every decoder leaves alone. This one reads it: sea level pressure, precise temperature and dew point to a tenth of a degree, peak wind, wind shift and frontal passage, lightning type and distance, hourly and six hour precipitation, snow depth, ice accretion, variable ceilings, tower visibility, pressure tendency, the synoptic cloud group, the Canadian layer codes, and the sensor status flags that tell you a reading is missing rather than clear.

ASK THE FORECAST A QUESTION

A TAF is a timeline, not a sentence. Scrub to any hour inside the validity period and see what is actually forecast at that moment, with FM, BECMG, TEMPO, INTER and PROB groups resolved in order. Elements that a BECMG group does not restate are carried forward correctly, which is exactly where reading a TAF by eye goes wrong. Temporary and probability conditions are shown as overlays on top of the base forecast, so you can see both the expected weather and the worst case.

IT SHOWS ITS WORK

Every flight category names the element that decided it and the rule behind it. Ceiling three thousand six hundred feet, from the lowest broken layer, and a scattered layer at two thousand six hundred does not count. You can check the app instead of trusting it, which is what makes it a study tool as well as a briefing tool.

TAP ANY GROUP

The raw report stays on screen and every group in it is tappable. Tap it and read what it means. A permanent glossary covers every weather code, every remark form and every abbreviation.

WORKS WITHOUT A SIGNAL

The decoder runs entirely on your device. Pasted reports decode with no connection at all, and the airport database, elevations, time zones and runway alignments are built into the app. Reports you have already fetched are cached and always labeled with their age, and cached data is never presented as if it were live.

MORE OF WHAT PILOTS ASK FOR

• Flight category at a glance, in the standard colors, with your own personal minimums alongside
• US categories or ICAO VMC and IMC, your choice
• Observation age in minutes, always visible, refreshed when you open the app
• Favorite airports, reorderable, with a map of nearby reporting stations
• Search by identifier, by name or by place
• Head wind and cross wind for a runway, corrected for magnetic variation, with the gust case shown too
• Density altitude, pressure altitude and relative humidity, suppressed rather than guessed when the underlying data is not trustworthy
• Local field time and Zulu,