`wx` - a command line interface for aviation weather

wx fetches weather data from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center's Text Data Server (TDS).

Installation from source

Clone the repository
Run sudo make install

Usage

Currently, we support fetching METARs in a variety of methods. When fetching METARs, a time constraint must be supplied. A time constraint can either be in the form "past x" or "between x and y".

$ wx metar --past 3h
$ wx metar --since 2020-01-01T00:00:00 --until 2020-01-02T00:00:00

The --past argument defaults to 1h, so if none of --past, --since, or --until are specified, METARs from the past hour will be fetched.

Note that the TDS only stores METARs from the past three days, so the wx command cannot effectively be used to pull historical data.

For a set of stations

You can fetch METARs from a set of stations by their full or partial ICAO IDs:

$ wx metar kbos
$ wx metar kbos ksea
$ wx metar kb

For stations in a region

You can fetch METARs from all stations within a rectangular or radial region. Rectangular regions are specified by a minLat,minLon,maxLat,maxLon tuple:

$ wx metar --rect 39,-70,40,-71

Radial regions are specified as a radius in statute miles around a center point as a dist,lat,lon tuple:

$ wx metar --radial 5.5,40,-70

For stations along a flight path

You can fetch weather for all stations with a distance of a specified flight path. A flight path is specified by a series of --waypoint arguments, where each waypoint can be an ICAO identifier or a lon,lat tuple. Waypoints must be specified in order from origin to destination.

$ wx metar --path-dist 10 --waypoint ksea --waypoint kbos

Controlling density

When running a query which will return METARs from many stations, it may be helpful to reduce the density of the results. This can be done with the --min-dist argument which specifies a minimum distance (in degrees of latitude or longitude) between stations to display. Providing a higher value for --min-dist will result in fewer stations being returned.

$ wx metar \
  --path-dist 10 --waypoint ksea --waypoint kbos \
  --min-dist 5 \

Filtering recency

There are two mechanisms for filtering results by recency. First, you can request the single most recent METAR from all the stations being fetched:

$ wx metar --past 6h kbos ksea --most-recent

Even though we've specified two stations, KBOS and KSEA, we'll only get a single METAR back from whichever of the two stations most recently made an observation.

The second filtering mechanism is --most-recent-by-station. This argument can take several values:

constraint (default): request the most recent for each METAR station in the fastest fashion.
postfilter: filter results after applying all other constraints.
false: don't filter results to only the most recent for each station.

Contributing

Email patches to ~benburwell/patchall@lists.sr.ht.

License

MIT