steelman/metar

Lua METAR parser

Lua METAR parser

This library can be used to parse METAR coded weather reports and fetch current METAR reports from NOAA Internet Weather Service in Lua.

The parser is pretty simple and by no means claims to support every feature one might find in METAR coded weather reports. For example, weather forecasts and automatic weather reports are not detected. Unsupported features in the weather reports are silently dropped.

Dependencies

LuaSocket is required for fetching weather reports from the Internet Weather Service. On Debian/Ubuntu systems you can install the package liblua5.1-socket2 in order to get LuaSocket installed.

My Lua weather library is required for doing some unit conversions.

Downloading

METAR parser home page is at http://solitudo.net/software/lua/metar/ and it can be downloaded by cloning the public Git repository at git://scm.solitudo.net/metar.git. Gitweb interface is available at http://scm.solitudo.net/gitweb/public/metar.git.

Installation

Install the src/metar.lua under some of the directories included in the default LUA_PATH for your Lua distribution, or install under desired location and set LUA_PATH accordingly. More info about LUA_PATH at http://www.lua.org/pil/8.1.html.

API Documentation

API documentation for metar is available under the api/ directory of the distribution.

References

The following material was used when researching METAR

• Federal Meteorological Handbook No. 1 - Surface Weather Observations and Reports
• Metar codes by Richard Ogley
• Meteorology @ West Moors - Metar decode
• Source code of GWeather
• Source code of Metar

Copyright and licensing

Copyright: © 2011 Tuomas Jormola [email protected] http://solitudo.net

Licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2.0. License terms are included in the file COPYING.