ThroughTheLivingSequence

So my sophomore nephew had a homework assignment that he needed help on the other day, time was urgent, his parents were busy, and I was around so I decided to give it a shot.

The assignment was to decode METAR and TAF weather broadcasts, which are broadcast systems for pilots. To the untrained eye, a METAR/TAF broadcast just looks like a whole load of gibberish. Well, the assignment was to get onto this SkyVector website and pick two random weather monitoring stations to decode info from. Students were given an abbreviation key for both METAR and TAF systems, which made the assignment pretty easy, or at least to me. My nephew was struggling because he has an interest in foreign countries like me, and was trying to decode broadcasts from stations in Russia, Mongolia, and Vietnam. For reference, the keys he was given only covered the METAR and TAF systems, which are common in western countries, like North/South America and western Europe. These countries all used their own systems, which were unrelated to METAR and TAF. 

So for the assignment, since we were running out of time and couldn't find the keys for these other systems online, we settled on a station in Wyoming and a station in... Ireland, I think, and I promised I'd help him investigate the other ones some other. It was pretty okay from there, just matching abbreviations to examples in the key and figuring it out from there.

Well, I happened to get very curious so I had him email me links for the SkyVector website and the METAR and TAF keys. On my own time, I studied through these and found another website which automatically converted broadcasts from any format. With that, I basically translated and taught myself the Russian system and decoded a few Russian stations.

For whatever reason, it was like... the most enjoyable thing I've done in years. Like I legitimately want to go back to school and learn to be a weather decoder and navigator for international flights. Even though that might not be a thing lmao- I could memorize all this stuff and be like, a solo bush pilot or something. That would be so fun-