What Does CLR Mean in a METAR?
CLR means no clouds detected below 12,000 ft (automated stations). It stands for CLeaR.
CLR in a real report
CLR
What it changes for you
CLR has a ceiling of its own: 12,000 feet. Above that, the sensor is not
looking, so the report cannot tell you anything.
For a light aircraft staying low that limitation rarely bites. For anything
climbing through, or for a night flight where you want to know whether there is
an overcast waiting at 15,000, CLR is a much weaker claim than it looks.
Reading it with AO1 or AO2
CLR and an AO1 or AO2 remark are two halves of the same fact: this report
came from a machine. Both tell you the sky was sampled rather than observed, and
that isolated cloud which never crossed the sensor was never counted.
Related codes
Decode a report containing this code
Paste a METAR, TAF, PIREP or SIGMET into the WxDecoder decoder. Every group comes back in plain English. The raw code sits beside it, so you can check the decode rather than trust it.
Frequently asked questions
What does CLR mean in a METAR?
No cloud detected below 12,000 feet, reported by an automated station. It is not the same as sky clear: cloud above 12,000 feet is invisible to the sensor and will not appear in the report at all.
Why do some reports say CLR and others SKC?
CLR comes from automated stations, which can only see up to 12,000 feet. SKC comes from human observers, who can report the whole sky. The abbreviation tells you which kind of station produced the report.