Not sure if you guys use this or not aviationweather.gov is pretty decent it crashes a few times here and there but overall pretty decent can get most metar stations auto or manned stations. I think you can also get most countries.
Thanks
for your post, I totally forgot this aviationweather.gov site, I used it in the past.
Disadvanteges?:
I wonder if aviationweather gets its data from another source, if they load their data also from tgftp.nws.noaa.gov they are down at the same time .
To construct the "Current Conditions" for a weather-station, the scripts use a CURL or a filegetcontents to load the METAR . Although good scripts cache the result and reuse it for at least 15 minutes, the METAR is relatively frequently loaded.
Using aviationweather.gov adds considerable server bandwidth as for more data is received then the METAR-data itself.
This link:
https://aviationweather.gov/metar/data?ids=EBBR&format=raw&date=0&hours=0HTML size = 19kB for this data set "EBBR 250650Z 03005KT 360V060 CAVOK 23/16 Q1016 NOSIG" .
Also we should "scrape" the html to get at the METAR => extra server time + changes in the scripts when the aviationweather site changes.
Advantages:
This aviationweather site also supplies the data in xml. In a previous release I used their DATA in my scripts that way as I do not like scraping HTML. Probably it is allowed to load the data as it is a USA .gov website. This is the xml one should use
https://aviationweather.gov/adds/dataserver_current/httpparam?dataSource=metars&requestType=retrieve&format=xml&hoursBeforeNow=3&mostRecent=true&stationString=EBBRTo do:- Check the consistency of the response times.
- Check if they are down when tgftp.nws.noaa.gov is down
Wim
