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Post by tornado on Mar 21, 2018 8:24:38 GMT -5
This morning, if a pilot wanted to fly from one side of Pennsylvania to the other, say from Erie to Philadelphia, they would have seen this displayed on ADDS/METARS at 1303Z:
At Franklin, the visibility was 10SM, right? The value to the left of the station circle was 10, and checking the actual observation revealed it was indeed 10SM:
So since the value left of the station circles at UNV, SEG and MUI were also 10, the pilot may not have checked those sites. Of course, if the pilot couldn't make it to Philadelphia and had to divert to one of those airports, they would have had to check the weather. However, each of those sites actually had 1SM visibility:
  
My eyesight could make out the decimal at the sites on the map reporting 0.5 or 0.3 for visibility; it doesn't appear that UNV, SEG and MUI had 1.0 on the map. If not, technology is not foolproof as the visibility was displayed with a tenfold error! This is one of the websites the government touts as being a pilot aid- but it's another tool that is not perfect.
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Post by tornado on Mar 21, 2018 8:40:32 GMT -5
A pilot flying in Maryland this hour, would have noticed that both DMW and FDK had moderate snow, as per the ** symbols next to the station circle. But BWI had no weather symbol next to it:   Yet, BWI had moderate snow, as shown when clicking on the station circle. This website has some issues in getting the proper weather displayed! Such a thing is compounded when sites like DMW report moderate snow, when heavy snow ought to have been reported:  |
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Post by tornado on Mar 21, 2018 9:08:00 GMT -5
A pilot flying in southeastern Virginia this morning, may have noticed this on the ADDS/METARS site:  While radar showed the rain ending over SE Virginia, Chesapeake Regional Airport (CPK) was displaying the weather symbol for moderate rain. So, which was correct? In this case, there was a radar outage in SE Virginia:  The ADDS/METARS site doesn't appear to have a display letting users know of radar outages. But since the plots of METAR data aren't always correct, pilots cannot rely on this site alone without checking other sources of information. |
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Post by tornado on Mar 21, 2018 12:57:44 GMT -5
Or, a pilot could pull up the METAR page, and it could look like this:   |
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Post by tornado on Apr 13, 2018 10:34:16 GMT -5
I hope pilots flying into Rapid City, South Dakota this morning, aren't relying on the radar overlay on ADDS/METARS:  |
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