Reading METAR for Skydivers

A METAR is the hourly surface weather report every airport pushes out. Pilots live by them. Most jumpers glance at the windsock and the sky and call it a day — fair enough on a CAVU afternoon, but the METAR is already telling you whether you've got a ceiling, how gusty the surface is, and whether there's cloud stacking up over the DZ. It takes about thirty seconds to read once you know the order.

Here's a typical one:

KXYZ 121853Z 24012G20KT 10SM FEW035 BKN075 24/17 A2998

Decoded field by field:

Group	Reads as	Means
KXYZ	Station	The reporting airport (4-letter ICAO; K in the US, C in Canada)
121853Z	Day + time	12th of the month, 1853 Zulu (UTC) — always Z, never local
24012G20KT	Wind	From 240° true at 12 knots, gusting 20
10SM	Visibility	10 statute miles
FEW035	Layer	Few clouds at 3,500 ft AGL
BKN075	Layer	Broken at 7,500 ft AGL
24/17	Temp/dew	24°C, dewpoint 17°C
A2998	Altimeter	29.98 inHg (Canada/most of the world uses Q1013 in hectopascals)

That's the whole grammar. Station, time, wind, visibility, weather, clouds, temp/dewpoint, pressure. Anything in a RMK block at the end is supplementary.

The cloud groups are the part that matters

Cloud cover is reported in eighths of the sky — oktas — and that's the half of the METAR worth memorizing, because it's the half that decides whether jump run works.

• FEW — 1–2 oktas
• SCT (scattered) — 3–4 oktas
• BKN (broken) — 5–7 oktas
• OVC (overcast) — 8 oktas

Heights are in hundreds of feet above the station. BKN075 is a broken layer at 7,500 AGL. Layers stack lowest to highest, so FEW035 SCT060 BKN090 is three decks climbing away from you. A CB or TCU tacked on the end (BKN040CB) means cumulonimbus or towering cumulus in that layer — convective, and worth a second look.

The ceiling is the lowest BKN or OVC layer. FEW and SCT don't count. So in the example above, the ceiling is 7,500 — that BKN075 deck. Run the math against your exit altitude: a full-altitude pass puts your jump run and most of your freefall above a broken layer, and your canopy ride starts in or above it. Below the deck means you're punching cloud and losing your ground reference. That's a description, not a verdict — cloud-clearance requirements (FAR 105 in the US, the CARs and your CSPA standards in Canada) and the S&TA's call decide what actually flies. The METAR just tells you the deck is there.

When the sky's obscured — fog, heavy haze — you'll see VV003 instead of a layer: vertical visibility 300 ft. That's the airport telling you it can't see up.

Wind: read it, but know its limits

24012G20KT is from 240° at 12 knots gusting 20. A couple of things jumpers trip on:

• It's true north, not magnetic. METARs and TAFs report wind referenced to true north. The tower, ATIS, and your runway numbers are magnetic. Depending on local variation that's several degrees of difference — enough to matter when you're lining up a pattern off a reported wind.
• It's a surface wind. This is the single most important limit of the whole report. The METAR describes one anemometer, a few meters off the ground, at one airport. It says nothing about the wind at 3,000 ft, at opening, or at exit. On plenty of days the surface is an 8-knot breeze and it's blowing 25 up where your canopy opens.

So the METAR is your landing-and-ground-reference picture: surface wind for your pattern, gust spread for the flare, ceiling and layers for whether you've got sky to work with. What it won't give you is the spot. For that you need winds aloft — and that's a different tool and a different read entirely. (More on that in opening winds vs. surface winds — the two don't move together, and planning a spot off the surface wind alone is how you end up in the next county.)

Where to pull them

In the US, NOAA's Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov) carries every METAR; in Canada it's Nav Canada. You don't have to hunt them down by hand, though — the Jump Slut DZ board pulls the live METAR for each dropzone alongside Open-Meteo data, and the weather page layers it with satellite, so the surface report sits right next to the bigger picture instead of in a separate browser tab.

Read the METAR for what it's good at — ceiling, layers, surface wind — and don't ask it for what it can't give you. The air you actually open and fly in lives above the station, and that's the next read.