A new METAR search engine

Hello! I fly a lot in real weather (as a user of xEnviro I'm constrained to it) but quite often I'd like to be able to choose the weather in which I fly.

 

So I figured it would be nice to have a website that allows you to find aerodromes by weather (instead of finding weather for aerodrome) and didn't find one. So I slapped together a bunch of lines of code and here it is. Maybe some of you will find it useful. If you have any remarks I'll be happy to hear them!

 

https://metarsearch.org/

 

That's a nice, clear website and I particularly like the examples & keywords in the help page.

 

I sim mostly offline but I think it will have a lot of takers when MSFS2020 is released: at a glance I didn't find a single reference in the hype to non-realtime weather in the new sim.

 

D

That's very interesting. Good job on all the coding. It must have taken forever seen as how you have so many allowed variables for search parameters to chose from. Where does the website pull the weather data from? Are you using some sort of API to achieve that? Also, I'm really surprised you were able to snatch that domain up. You'd think someone else would have owned it already. I see the TLD of .com is available though. Any particular reason for .org?

Thank you guys!

 

That's very interesting. Good job on all the coding. It must have taken forever seen as how you have so many allowed variables for search parameters to chose from. Where does the website pull the weather data from? Are you using some sort of API to achieve that? Also, I'm really surprised you were able to snatch that domain up. You'd think someone else would have owned it already. I see the TLD of .com is available though. Any particular reason for .org?

 

The METAR data is pulled from NOAA - they expose current (cached) data for the whole world in CSV and XML (AFAIR) - I'm pulling one of these files. It's stated in the about section. The service is generally written in such a way where adding new data sources (be it APIs, random data files or whatever) is modular and relatively easy.

 

Regarding the domain I was surprised too. I felt that ".org" is more suitable to a non-profit hobby project than ".com" (which theoretically is for companies). Maybe I'll buy the ".com" and redirect to ".org" if the site gains some popularity.

Thank you guys!

 

That's very interesting. Good job on all the coding. It must have taken forever seen as how you have so many allowed variables for search parameters to chose from. Where does the website pull the weather data from? Are you using some sort of API to achieve that? Also, I'm really surprised you were able to snatch that domain up. You'd think someone else would have owned it already. I see the TLD of .com is available though. Any particular reason for .org?

 

The METAR data is pulled from NOAA - they expose current (cached) data for the whole world in CSV and XML (AFAIR) - I'm pulling one of these files. It's stated in the about section. The service is generally written in such a way where adding new data sources (be it APIs, random data files or whatever) is modular and relatively easy.

 

Regarding the domain I was surprised too. I felt that ".org" is more suitable to a non-profit hobby project than ".com" (which theoretically is for companies). Maybe I'll buy the ".com" and redirect to ".org" if the site gains some popularity.