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.