Real Weather for Flight Simulator Pilots

Surface Observations for 2003010715

Thanks!

The data on this page is provided courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

The weather data is provided free of charge and is made
available for non-commercial use only.

This information is designed for the entertainment of flight simulator pilots only.
Do not even think of using this for real aviation planning.

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times.

Congratulations Mike Hamilton for being the 200,000th visitor!
Congratulations Bob Bernstein for being the 100,000th visitor!

Announcements

1/29/2001 X-Plane: Recent versions of X-Plane have added METAR support. Just grab the current world METAR surface observations (below) if you are an X-Plane user. Click here to get more information on using this weather data in X-Plane, pointers to automatic data downloaders, and other hints and tips.
6/25/98 Announcement: Current worldwide METAR data is now online and updated hourly.
1/12/98 Announcement: Jeff Wheeler (j4cwheel@ix.netcom.com) has released RWX5.0 -- Real Weather For MSFS-95/98. This the weather environment as you fly with MS flight simulator 95/98 to actual weather that can be downloaded from this page. Click here for more info.
5/7/97 Announcement: I have released rwx-0.6c. This new release should now properly convert Canadian temps reported in Celsius to Fahrenheit.
1/31/97 Questions? I have added a Frequently Asked Questions list.

Current METAR Surface Observations

World METAR - The complete worldwide set of METAR surface observations.
World METAR (compressed) - The same complete worldwide set of METAR surface observations but compressed with gzip compression. This usually yields about a 75% compression ratio.

Current Surface Observations (Old SAO format)

World SAO - The complete worldwide set of surface observations in old SAO format.

Miscellaneous Data

Making it Work

The weather data on this page is only one piece of the puzzle. If you own flight shop, get WXADV. Otherwise, you will need REAL-WX. Follow these links to find out more about the software you need to use this data.

Download the Software! -- You must download either REAL-WX or WXADV to use this data in your flight simulator (unless you use X-Plane, then you just need the data file.)
Setting all Three WX Areas with Real-WX -- a clever tutorial by Max Harald Vargas Diez (harv@codetel.net.do)
WXADV Tutorial -- A nicely done tutorial for incorporating this data into your Flight Shop adventures. Written by Bob Bobic rbobic@ix.netcom.com.
An explanation of the data format -- We maintain data for over 1200 weather stations across Canada and the USA. This data includes information such as temperature, winds, cloud layers, visibility, and pressure.
``C'' source code. If you are interested in incorporating this data into any of your own projects, here is some C routines which parse the coded weather reports.

Experiencing Problems?

Life never seems to go as smooth as we would hope. If you have a question or a problem, have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions list. There is a good chance your question will be answered there.

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Last modified: 10/29/2003
Curtis L. Olson