A lawyer contacted me the other day looking for an aviation expert witness. Ultimately I decided not to accept the engagement due to a lack of sufficient data for rendering an opinion, but I thought I’d write down what I learned about finding archived aviation weather, forecasts, and warnings.
The Plymouth State University Weather Center, run by good-hearted folks out of New Hampshire, offers archived radar and satellite images as well as surface charts.
Iowa State University offers archived pilot reports back to 2015 and National Weather Service text products, including aviation Center Weather Advisories back to 2008. NOAA itself, when not saving the whales, runs a “tape robotics” archive for NEXRAD and other data.
aviationwxchartsarchive.com offers a variety of charts and text products, including SIGMETs and SIGWX.
I couldn’t find anything for archived textual AIRMETs. If anyone knows of a source for these I would be grateful!
Service idea: A site where you can say “Give me a standard weather briefing as of Date X” Given that the NTSB already needs most of these data for its investigations, I’m surprised that the federal government doesn’t already run such a site (maybe the explanation is that the briefing web sites have been done by contractors and there is no point in a contractor innovating). The amount of data being generated per day is more or less fixed (old-school text format) and the cost of storage keeps falling, so this should become cheaper and easier to run over time.
Phillip – having done research for litigation of several different aircraft accidents, you can get “official” archived weather through the NCDC. However, I use this archive information more to unravel the weather mystery behind such accidents for teaching purposes. While you can find lots of locations with some of the weather archives, most of it may not be in its original form pilots use. That may work in litigation cases, but not be as useful to train pilots. That’s why I built my Internet Wx Brief Roadmap about 10 years ago that includes about 18 months of archives for just about all of the primary preflight weather (no I don’t archive AIRMET text since AIRMETs are no longer the primary product). So with this tool I can type in a date and time and it will recreate the weather as if you were taken back to that time sitting in front of the computer. In fact, I use this as a teaching tool in my live aviation weather workshops I hold around the country.
“The text AIRMET is the result of the production of the G-AIRMET, but provided in a time smear for a 6 hr valid period
G-AIRMETs provide a higher forecast resolution than text AIRMET products.
Since G-AIRMETs and text AIRMETs are created from the same forecast “production” process, there exists perfect consistency between the two.
Using the two together will provide clarity of the area impacted by the weather hazard and improve situational awareness and decision making.”
http://www.cfinotebook.net/notebook/weather-and-atmosphere/in-flight-weather-advisories
I am guessing that there is an algorithm(1) producing the seminal G-Airmet from an autonomous weather data feed. The text bulletin is totally derived from the “graphic” bulletin. The graphic bulletin is ultimately data-driven and must produce a full textual equivalent from a first algorithm(1). From this textual precursor of G-Airmet, the graphical G-Airmet is produced using a second algorithm(2), aking data wholly from the feed of algorithm(1). Airmate text is produced from a third algorithm(3) that takes the product of the first algorithm(1). I suspect that there are additional algorithms to prompt production of updates and corrections.
I wonder how much human oversight and input figures into the process.