I’ve just found this website IEM :: Download ASOS/AWOS/METAR Data One can get historical METAR for the whole world, as far as I’ve understood. There used to be a rmetar package for translation of METAR to human readable weather data.
I wonder whether these METAR data are already accessible through NOAA for instance, or would it be an useful addition to make a package for accessing it?
Thanks for the answer and the link! The historical data is not in NOAA either, the link in the Python thing is broken but they seemed to only parse the latest metar for each location whereas mesonet provides historical data.
I think rmetar only translated metar but I’ll look again to see whether it downloaded such reports.
Now the question is maybe, would having a pkg for fetching and parsing metar be useful? I’m interested in the hyderabad one, that’s all i know.
Here is the old R package https://github.com/jwijffels/RMETAR It uses C code and was removed from CRAN “as basic C error stopping installation on OS X was not corrected within 6 weeks.”. RMETAR only accessed the current metar from NOAA:
It’s nice that it’s called RMETAR therefore “rmetar” is still available.
I wonder whether one needs C code for decoding metar (surely there must be other decoders?), and if one does, I don’t know how to use C code. Then, if I did, I wondered how one can re-use code from an old package?
Another possibility is that somewhere there’s an archive of all decoded METAR. Now I know there are all METAR on the mesonet website but maybe the decoded version is somewhere else.
