pimatic-metar-weather

Pimatic plugin to obtain weather data from METAR reports.

Introduction

METAR is the abbreviation for METeorological Aerodrome Reports standardized by the ICAO. It was introduced in 1968 to provide pilots with observational weather data to be used for pre-flight weather briefings, for example. Nowadays, METAR data can be obtained for about 9000 airport sites around the world. Typically, the accuracy of the measurement data is better than the data provided by the numerous public weather services.

Currently, the plugin is able to provide data for

air temperature at ground-level
dew point temperature
relative humidity
barometric pressure
wind speed, direction, and gust
generalized cloud cover in percent based on octas where cover for different heights is accumulated
precipitation (rain and snow if available)

Additionally, it possible to obtain the observation time, that is the UTC time stamp at which the measured data has been recorded.

Future work

There are a couple of things on my list:

~~add information on precipitation (rain and snow if available)~~
add switch to support imperial measures
provide a textual report on visibility, clouds and precipitation
add support for TAF forecasts
localization

Contributions

Contributions to the project are welcome. You can simply fork the project and create a pull request with your contribution to start with. If you like this plugin, please consider ★ starring the project on github.

Plugin Configuration

{
      "plugin": "metar-weather",
      "debug": false,
}

The plugin has the following configuration properties:

Property	Default	Type	Description
debug	false	Boolean	Debug mode. Writes debug messages to the pimatic log, if set to true

Device Configuration

MetarWeather Device Type

Screenshot

The Metar Weather device is provided to obtain weather data for a single location.

{
      "id": "metar-1",
      "name": "TXL",
      "class": "MetarWeather",
      "attributes": [
        "temperature",
        "dewPoint",
        "humidity",
        "pressure",
        "windSpeed",
        "windGust",
        "windDirection",
        "clouds"
      ],
      "stationCode": "EDDT",
      "interval": 30
}

The location is identified by four letter station code. It can be looked up as follows:

The device has the following configuration properties:

Property	Default	Type	Description
interval	30	Number	The data acquisition time interval in minutes (minimum 30)
stationCode	-	String	The 4-letter station code for the weather station
attributes	"temperature"	Enum	The attribute to be exhibited by the device

MetarWeatherTimeBased Device Type

This device type has the same configuration properties as MetarWeather and provides additional properties to query the weather data at the given local time of day being transformed to a given target timezone. In other words, it is possible to get the weather data at the same time of day in the target timezone as the local time of day.

Depending on the timezones used the current time of day in the target timezone may be less than requested time of day. In this case the data of the previous day will be used. If daylight savings shall be ignored it is suggested to use universal time UTC along with a given offset time. The following configuration properties are provided:

Property	Default	Type	Description
interval	30	Number	The data acquisition time interval in minutes (minimum 30)
stationCode	-	String	The 4-letter station code for the weather station
attributes	"temperature"	Enum	The attribute to be exhibited by the device
localTimezone	""	String	The local time zone to be applied. If empty the timezone derived from the system will be used
localUtcOffset	0	Number	Local timezone offset to be added localTimezone. Useful if local timezone is UTC
targetTimezone	"UTC	String	The target time zone to be applied. If the timezone is running behind UTC the data of the previous day will be used
targetUtcOffset	0	Number	Target timezone offset to be added targetTimezone. Useful if target timezone is UTC

npm