In the summer of '23, I created a proof of concept for VFA that provided a simple webpage that displayed current METAR data for any airport. This page would also alert the user if the METAR prohibited students from a solo flight, based on wind, visibility, or clouds.
you can view this page here: https://metarmonitor.fly.dev
I thought it would be interesting to see if I could iterate on that idea with a Tableau dashboard as the user interface. The objective is to provide the user with a simple dashboard to quickly understand the METAR data for a given observation. I added historical data, and provided the user with the ability to select observation times in the past. The data is retrieved from https://aviationweather.gov/data/api/
- get_metar.py retrieves the data and stores in a SQLite db (metar_observations.db)
- check_data.py queries the db to check if there are 24 observations per day
- output.csv is used to get the data into Tableau Public
Note: The dataset was ingested into Tableau without the need for much transformation. There are a few calculated fields in Tableau that include the logic to determine if weather conditions permit solo flights. Using SQL to join METAR data with data from my ads-b receiver would provide an interesting challenge.
Dashboard link:
https://public.tableau.com/views/METARMap/Dashboard2?:language=en-US&:sid=&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link
Examples of Weather Limiting Solo Flights:
- February 28 at 19:00 - Wind at 26 kts
- March 4 at 6:00 - Clouds at 300 ft
- postman - initial api discovery
- pycharm - python ide
- dbvisualizer - adhoc sql queries
- tableau public - dashboard creation and hosting
- github - code/data repository
- Convert datetimes to local, API returns zulu
- Provide better wind indicator viz with compass rose
- Provide information on multiple cloud reports
- Provide natural language weather observations
- Run python script on cron to collect data everyday
- Expand dataset to additional airports
- Provide additional dashboards for analyzing metar patterns