If you do anything with Aviation, NOAA Aviation Live Sky Weather is a weather app you should have installed and ready to go on your phone. It makes keeping track of METAR and TAF data for all your favorite stations super easy, and gives you all the information you need to plan trips.
To get the full benefit of the app, you may wish to get a premium subscription. It’s a monthly deal, but it doesn’t get auto-renewed, so you don’t have to worry about it continually charging your credit card long after you’ve forgotten about it. Just buy it when you need it.
One handy feature the premium subscription opens up to you is font size customization. Small font is wonderful when you want to fit a lot of information on your page, but if your eyes are tired and you need to look up more than one or two stations, larger type can be a godsend. Font size customization allows you to choose your preferred size, anywhere from 8 to 22. And it’s easy to switch if you find you want a big picture view after all.
More Features
You also get an option of choosing a wind speed at which you’d like to receive warning reports. That’s right there in the same drop in tab. Once it is set up, you’ll get alerts for all airports in your favourite list.
Your premium subscription will also let you reorder your favorites list. This is very helpful once you have more than ten or fifteen on there. All you need to do for this is drag and drop.
But the feature that, to me, makes the premium subscription completely worth it is the way it teaches you raw METAR and TAF code. Click on any part of the METAR or TAF code. Right away, the corresponding section of the decoded description will be highlighted. If you’re fluent enough that raw METAR reads like plain English, you may not care about this. But for the rest of us, this turns our favorite Aviation Live Weather App into a very effective METAR trainer.
Just to make that METAR trainer a little more effective, there’s one more premium feature you’ll love to play with. A quiz that tests your knowledge of METAR/TAF. You get ten questions each time you attempt this quiz. When you’re finished you’ll get your answers graded and the correct answers provided.
Maybe we just found a better way to spend that downtime than CandyCrush.
