Info: Impacts TAF Board

TAF Board

The TAF board is a time series display of weather conditions. There are two formats for the board: condensed and expanded.

Condensed view

The condensed view lists any number of stations along the vertical axist and time along the horizontal axis (See Fig 1). The first column is the latest observation. Each box (hourly forecasts from TAF) is color coded based on the level of the hazard. Green represents no hazard, yellow minimal hazard, red significant hazard and purple major hazard. The letters in the box represent the cause of the hazard. They are as follows:

  • CIG - Ceiling
  • VIS - Visibility
  • WX - Weather (thunderstorms, freezing rain)
  • WSpd - Wind speed
  • WGst - Wind gusts

There could be multiple hazards but only the top one from this list if shown.

TAF Board condensed
Figure 1: TAF Board condensed view

The cutoffs for each color are shown in Fig. 2. The default criteria use the flight category cutoffs

TAF Board legend
Figure 2: TAF Board color criteria

For more detailed information for each site, click on the station identifier. This will go to the expanded view for each site. In this view, each weather condition is listed along the vertical axis (See Fig. 3). These are:

  • Vis - Visibility in miles
  • Ceil - Cloud ceiling in 100s feet
  • Cover - Cloud cover: CLR, FEW, SCT, BKN, OVC
  • FltCat - Flight category: VFR, MVFR, IFR, LIFR
  • Wx - Weather
  • WDir - Wind direction
  • WSpd - Wind speed in knots
  • WGst - Wind gusts in knots
TAF Board expanded
Figure 3: TAF Board expanded view

Runway Winds

In addition, for airports with runway information, cross and head wind values are also displayed. These are available for each runway set for that airport. If an airport has three parallel runways, only one is shown. The runway is shown as RXX/XX with the primary and reciprocal headings. The wind data is computed based on actual runway direction relative to due north.

  • XWnd - Cross wind speed in knots. Positive values represent winds from left to right given the first runway listed. For if the runway is R13/31, the cross wind data is for runway 13. If it's runway 31, invert the data.
  • HWnd - Head wind speed in knots. Positive values represent head winds and negative values represent tail winds. If the value for runway R13/31 is -9, then there is a 9 knot tail wind on runway 13. This would be a 9 knot head wind for runway 31.

URL Options

Here is a list of the URL options:

  • ids=id[+id...] - Specifies the stations to retrieve data
  • format={condensed|expanded} - Specifies the format of output as either condensed or expanded. The default is condensed.
  • date=yyyymmddhhnn - This selects a specific date and time to display. ADDS saves a week of METAR data so this can be used to get older METAR data. The default is current.


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