TAFs will now be issued for the Regional Airports

Su Campu

This notice has gone up on the Met Eireann Self briefing site today.

Please note: CHANGES TO REGIONAL AIRPORT FORECASTS from 19th November 2012.Changes to the forecasts issued by Met Éireann will be implemented for the regional airports of: Waterford(EIWF), Kerry(EIKY), Galway(EICM), Sligo(EISG), Donegal(EIDL) The current Local Area Forecast (LAF) will be withdrawn from use and replaced with a Terminal Aerodrome Forecast (TAF) at 1100z on the above date.

Cessna_Pilot

About time really.

bluecode

Indeed, never understood why LAF's were ever used. Why were they not TAF's from the start?

Are they going to be long or short TAF's?

APM

Bout' time. I flew into Kerry quite a bit this summer...phoning them up 3hrs before I was due to arrive for an actual weather with no tempo or TAF. After that it was purely guesswork.

Certainly the only place I've flown to that I had to phone the tower up before leaving the crewroom. This should bring them into line with the rest

Su Campu

APM wrote: »

Bout' time. I flew into Kerry quite a bit this summer...phoning them up 3hrs before I was due to arrive for an actual weather with no tempo or TAF. After that it was purely guesswork.

Certainly the only place I've flown to that I had to phone the tower up before leaving the crewroom. This should bring them into line with the rest

Do you use the Briefing service? The LAFs are still pretty imformative, and all the metars are there too. What's wrong with this? Would a standard TAF tell you any more? I don't see how.

EIKY LOCAL AREA FORECAST VALID 151600/152400 WIND 24005KT TEMPO 1524 VRB03KT VISIBILITY 9999 TEMPO 1522 5000 PROB30 TEMPO 1822 3000 WEATHER NSW TEMPO 1522 -DZ BR CLOUD BKN010 TEMPO 1522 BKN005 PROB30 TEMPO 1822 BKN003 BECMG 2224 SCT012 CLOUD HEIGHTS GIVEN ABOVE MSL=

Cessna_Pilot

APM wrote: »

Bout' time. I flew into Kerry quite a bit this summer...phoning them up 3hrs before I was due to arrive for an actual weather with no tempo or TAF. After that it was purely guesswork.

Certainly the only place I've flown to that I had to phone the tower up before leaving the crewroom. This should bring them into line with the rest

You obviously haven't got good dispatchers at your origin airport, we are always presented with the most recent metar, or if not available the most recent weather hand written with the rest of the wx pack as they call them up for us, or me anyway

Su Campu

Cessna_Pilot wrote: »

You obviously haven't got good dispatchers at your origin airport, we are always presented with the most recent metar, or if not available the most recent weather hand written with the rest of the wx pack as they call them up for us, or me anyway

It's all online or on your phone at http://briefing.met.ie No need even for dispatchers!

APM

The airline I work for use pilotbrief and it doesn't include metar/taf for Kerry. I presumed that would change with this new format so maybe I'm wrong.

We don't have internet access in our crewrooms, and I was flying to Kerry from Portugal so best we could do is phone Kerry tower. Seemingly in the tower they didn't have access to any forecast, as any time I asked they said only metar available.

Fully Established

Su Campu wrote: »

It's all online or on your phone at http://briefing.met.ie No need even for dispatchers!

I think you missed the point , dispatchers are used for all airline operations , the dispatchers gathers all the required wx and brings it to the aircraft , if its GA flying of course could check it yourself online.

Su Campu

APM wrote: »

The airline I work for use pilotbrief and it doesn't include metar/taf for Kerry. I presumed that would change with this new format so maybe I'm wrong.

We don't have internet access in our crewrooms, and I was flying to Kerry from Portugal so best we could do is phone Kerry tower. Seemingly in the tower they didn't have access to any forecast, as any time I asked they said only metar available.

Fully Established wrote: »

I think you missed the point , dispatchers are used for all airline operations , the dispatchers gathers all the required wx and brings it to the aircraft , if its GA flying of course could check it yourself online.

What I'm saying is that the information is there. There are plenty of airports in the UK and US for which no TAFs are issued. At least they are issued for the Irish Regionals and are available to anyone with a phone. Dispatchers have no excuse for not being able to access this information, sat at a desk.

Madpaddy79

Dispatchers this, dispatchers that. If only pilots could learn how to wipe their own arse's. Xxx

the beerhunter

it's not unknown for the eidw taf to change shortly after something prompts the folk at met to look out the window. i guess met eireann got their hands on some cheap webcams to enable this "service" for the regionals.

Su Campu

I don't know, Met Eireann have a perfectly good service there and still people see fit to make stupid comments about them instead of actually using the service.

bluecode

The point it for the benefit of the unitiated is that in many situations the LAFS did not show up because of course they were LOCAL and Irish. I never really understood why somewhere that had a METAR didn't have a TAF. TAFs on the other hand are official and will show up.

All the LAFs covered proper airports not some field somewhere in the sticks. They should have been TAFs all along.

Well overdue.

bluecode

Madpaddy79 wrote: »

Dispatchers this, dispatchers that. If only pilots could learn how to wipe their own arse's. Xxx

Idiot!

Teebor15

it's not unknown for the eidw taf to change shortly after something prompts the folk at met to look out the window. i guess met eireann got their hands on some cheap webcams to enable this "service" for the regionals.

I had the pleasure of visiting Aviation Met in Shannon last year and the chap there explained that the metars are put together at the airports every 30mins during opening hours by the ATCOs (i think) who are qualified met observers. They are then sent to Met in Shannon who use them along with all their other info to create LAFs. He said that they would be changing to TAFs soon (didnt turn out to be as soon as he said!) as the airports now had much better Met stations for gathering the data thus the quality and accuracy of the metars were far better and more reliable. I think he said (i could be wrong) the reason they were never TAFs from the start was that back in the 80s when the regionals opened first the condition for a TAF was that you had a qualified forecaster at that location. This is why Knock always had TAFs as there has and still is a met office in Knock manned by a met forecaster. That condition has now changed so all regionals will have TAFs from monday.

As far as i know only the TAFs will be available on OPMET (ie avbrief,etc..) for now and hopefully Metars in the near (take with a pinch of salt) future!

the beerhunter

Su Campu wrote: »

I don't know, Met Eireann have a perfectly good service there and still people see fit to make stupid comments about them instead of actually using the service.

i don't use the service, i suffer from it because my employer is locked into a long term obligation with them. or so say the wise folk in the breakroom. as for who makes the observations, i'm fairly certain met have their own people who aren't atcos.

Su Campu

The service is there for anyone who wants to subscribe.

There are no forecasters at the airports but there are Met Eireann-trained observers at the big four, which is a very different job. All the forecasting for all the airports, including the regionals, is done by the Aviation Division at Shannon. The four big airports are synoptic stations and have an observer on duty 24/7, apart from Knock, which only has one during the day, with automatic reporting at night. As well as reporting in metar format these also report in Synop FM-12 code, which is a very much more detailed report and could not be done by an ATCO.

The regionals do not have Met Eireann observers but the ATCOs do send reports to them in metar format. Outside of operational hours these reports are automated. I'm not sure why they still had the LAFs but in any case these are produced by Shannon and not by the airports themselves.

Teebor15

there are Met Eireann-trained observers at the big four

#

The regionals have the same. The ATCO's and in the case of Sligo and Donegal the AFISO's are trained and compile the metars.