HF Cloudbase
High Frequency Airport METAR Cloud Visualizations
HF Cloudbase
High Frequency Airport METAR Cloud Visualizations
Currently the plots can contain up to 168 hours (1 week) of METAR data from standard ASOS/AWOS stations at a given ICAO airport code. Plotted cloud heights are in reference to the airport ground elevation and rounded to the nearest 100 ft. Add the specific airport elevation listed above to get cloud heights in reference to MSL. Clear sky conditions (yellow circles) are plotted at 0 ft elevation and the flight rules category is plotted at a negative elevation arbitrarily (color coded squares) for quick referencing. Note that lower level cloudy conditions (especially overcast) can obscure higher elevation clouds from being detected by the airport's ceilometer.
Hourly cloud data ('STD', larger filled icons) are based on standard airport METAR readings that are fetched using the Synoptic Data API. These observations average the past 30 minutes of airport ceilometer data with double weighting for the last 10 minutes of passing sky condition observations. High frequency cloud data ('HF', smaller unfilled icons) are generated from the same METAR stations and fetched using the same API. The resulting HF ceilometer observations may be more prone to overall cloud status mischaracterization in patchy cloud conditions than the hourly METAR data since each HF observation is the result of only a 5 minute collection of vertical point measurements with standard, non-weighted averaging.
Finally, note that the airport locations on the map are color-coded by the IFR status computation on the most recent data available (whether STD or HF derived). Thus the IFR status may not match the 'official' hourly METAR IFR designation.
Wind direction is plotted as 0 by default if the corresponding wind speed is also zero. Some data points can be difficult to discern in this scenario as they may be effectively overwritten by the accompanying parameter.
This website was made by Nick Statom of the Air-Sea Interaction Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is not actively monitored and only occasionally updated. Users who utilize this site's data assume all risk and responsibility. Data outages may occur occasionally due to changes in the source API or data storage server status.