Metarize

Metarize is a powerful tool to consult two iconic aviation weather products — METARs and TAFs — and use them for a variety of missions beyond aviation. It leverages the properties of these weather products: - Their compact, very quick to read format - Their high quality, on which millions of lives depend - Their global availability in a standard format … and provides features to make them useful for a variety of critical missions - Push notifications - Discovery of local stations (using GPS or a map location) - Monitoring and reporting of the integrity and recency of the data using visual color codes - Offline support – refresh data in the background so it’s available to consult if connectivity is lost - Part 107 readiness indication (“go”/”no-go” badge to assist with take-off decisions based upon visibility and cloud ceiling height) - Decoding assistance, to help learn the format (it’s well worth the effort!) More subtle design goals – some of these are still actively being worked on: - Chain of trust – report any element that puts the integrity or recency of what it displayed in question - Latency – use the lowest latency source possible - Resiliency – make the app resilient to failures - Security-minded – require no permissions beyond internet access (optionally use more permissions, see below) - Tactical-friendliness – low light color scheme Permissions: - Internet – required, to download weather data - Location – optional, to automatically display nearby stations - Notifications – optional, for push notifications Background-fetching (offline support) – this feature makes the app periodically (every 15 minutes in most cases) download an up to date METAR or TAF for each favorite station/product combination. If the device goes offline, the last data fetched will be available.