Historical Weather Data - Student needs help

FlightAware General
1

Dear Forum,

Please excuse my intrusion, I am a geography student and currently trying to put together an economic geography analysis that entails taking a look at “flyable days”. What I am looking for is a yearly average of VFR / IFR days by county for the USA. So essentially this might be important if an aircraft is VFR only and they are based at a foggy airport, it may be common sense to many but from an economic standpoint, geography plays a large roll in aircraft profitability. I am not a pilot so I am learning as I go here. I know there are different levels of IFR/VFR like marginal, etc but this is a class project, not a real high speed publishable study so any help would be great. If anyone might even know where I can get historical county level data on ceiling and vis, that would be cool, I can do the coding myself.

Any help would be appreciated. My email is: ack0052@unt.edu
or wramcmedic2@yahoo.com

Thank you very much.

Kind Regards-
Aaron K.

2

Try contacting NOAA; they publish the hourly METARs for most airports and probably keep an archive of them. From the METAR you can apply the standard VFR/MVFR/IFR/LIFR (probably grouping the first two and last two) metric to determine if the hour was VFR or IFR.

3

ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html

4

Not text based, but you can see where the crummy weather was at

hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/dailywxmap/frame.html