I notice this is only available if you select a personal weather station, not history at an airport station. I am a little mistrustful of PWS as they are not calibrated and maintained as the airport sites are. The airport sites already have a good metric page available There is a °F/°C switch near the upper right of the page to switch units.
The PWS page makes three errors which the main page does not. Since they already "know better" on the main page, the question is why change for these PWS pages. (s/b is shorthand for "should be") Wind: kph s/b km/h Precip. Rate: mm/hr s/b mm/h Pressure: mb s/b hPa The main page uses too much resolution for readings that come out of the automated airport box already quantized. Other than that, their metric conversion is quite good. These items are not available from a PWS. Visibility: 0-3 miles, various resolutions 1/16 - 1/2 mile, vary for manual and automated observation. 0.1 km resolution would adequately represent them all. >3 miles, quantized to 1 mile resolution, in metric should be to 1 km >resolution. For max 10 mile visibility, they use 16.1 km, but 16 km would be >more consistent with the resolution of the data and not imply false precision. Ceiling: Data is quantized 0-5000' by 100' increments, 5000-10000' by 500' increments, >10000 by 1000' increments. It makes no sense to convert to nearest meter. I would suggest rounding to 10 m resolution for lower altitudes, 100 m resolution above 3000 m. (Quantizations above are from explanation of METAR, the automated current conditions statement for pilots. The averaging and preprocessing of the data taken in the airport box is defined in FMH-1.) ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Cc: Don Hillger <[email protected]>; Gary Brown <[email protected]>; Lorelle Young <[email protected]>; Valerie Antoine <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 1:08 PM Subject: [USMA:53437] New Weather Underground PWS Metric Dashboard in Beta Weather Underground, which is the most metricated and most detailed weather site, has rolled out a beta version of its Personal Weather Station (PWS) display and has asked for feedback. USMA's Don Hillger was instrumental in getting Weather Underground to display correct metric usage. Don (and others), you may wish to check out the beta and make comments as appropriate. In order to see the beta display, you have to click on a Weather Station name on the main page. You will then be taken to a page headed Weather History for [Name of Weather Station]. In the heading of that page, you will see the New Dashboard link to click on. On the beta page, you will see a Feedback button about half-way down on the left side. Note that in order to see the metric display, when you first go into the site, you need to click Settings in the upper right-hand corner, and in the Units pull-down menu, select Metric. I noticed one correction to be made and have submitted it: to use "km/h" instead of the deprecated "kph". --Martin Morrison, METRIC TODAY Training & Education Columnist
