News and Notes

One of the seemingly internet-unique archives that the IEM maintains is a parsed dataset of Terminal Aerodome Forecasts (TAFs). TAFs are issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) as aviation specific short term forecasts at many airports. The raw forecast text looks like:

FTUS43 KMPX 220156 AAA
TAFSTC
TAF AMD
KSTC 220156Z 2202/2224 17005KT P6SM BKN050
      TEMPO 2202/2204 -SHRA
     FM220400 18005KT P6SM SCT250 PROB30 2210/2215 4SM -TSRA
      OVC035CB
     FM221500 27010KT P6SM OVC050=

A review of the IEM's TAF processing found some gaps with how the TEMPO and PROB30 fields were stored within the database. These have hopefully now been corrected with an additional field now available within the download called ftype, which delineates between the observation, forecast, tempo, and probability data types.

As always, please send any feedback on this and how the archive could be more useful for your needs!