About wxdecoder

Who writes this

wxdecoder.com is built and published by Recall Aviation, a First Bravo company. The aviation explanations on this site, the decoding rules, and the flight-category logic are written and reviewed by an ATP-rated pilot, rather than assembled from other weather sites.

What this site is

wxdecoder turns raw METAR and TAF reports into plain English: flight category, wind and crosswind, ceiling and visibility, hazards, and a group-by-group decode. It is free and needs no account.

It is for education and situational awareness only. It is not an official weather briefing source and should not be the sole source for flight planning or go/no-go decisions. Always verify with approved aviation weather sources.

How the decoding works

Decoding is deterministic. A parser extracts the facts from the raw report, and the explanations are generated from those facts. Weather is never invented, paraphrased by a language model, or inferred beyond what the report states. The raw report stays visible next to every explanation so you can check the decode against the source.

Where a field has no on-field observation, the page says so and names the nearest reporting station with its distance and age, rather than presenting another airport's weather as if it were the field's.

Where the data comes from

Weather is from AviationWeather.gov and the National Weather Service; operational status is from the FAA. Airport and runway records come from OurAirports and the FAA NASR dataset. Full attribution is on the Data sources page.

Editorial and advertising

Sponsorships are labeled and never change weather data, decoding, or which airports are covered. See the Advertising & Sponsorship Policy.

Corrections

If a decode looks wrong, tell us and include the raw report: decoder@wxdecoder.com. Decoding errors are the ones we most want to hear about.