For recreational use only, must not be used for real life flying!
Instructions
Hover mouse over a coloured area (tap on tablets or phones) to reveal details. A double click/tap will remove it – can be helpful if you need to get to a small area covered by a larger blob. An area can have more than one active SIGMET, telltale signs are weird colours or overly fat borders.Solid borders indicate a forecast phenomenon, a dashed border means something is actually observed. The reported conditions trigger different colours, hover around to see for yourself.
This page updates two or three times an hour. If you see a button labelled Refresh there may be updated data available, click it to refresh the page. Expired Sigmets are removed from the map every minute.
Technicalities
Raw data comes from NOAA in geoJSON format. They have some script that tries to machine read the raw text Sigmets and convert them to geoJSON shapes. This often works well, but now and then the script fails parsing the text which yields absurd shapes on the map.Sometimes there is no data available from NOAA, and sometimes their server takes 10+ seconds to reply, causing a timeout. Usually they fix the problem quickly, but once in a while the problem remains for longer periods. There is not much I can do about these things. However, feel free to drop me a note anyway if the problem persists – perhaps it is easily fixed after all.
This page is the result of a weekend’s pastime and may never leave its experimental state.
SIGMET abbreviations
Aviation lingo is compact and cryptic, here are some of the most commonly used SIGMET abbreviations:
EMBDEmbedded
FCSTForecast
FRQFrequent
ICEIcing
MTWMountain wave
SEVSevere
SQLSquall line
TSThunderstorms
TURBTurbulence
VAVolcanic ash cloud
WIWithin
You will have to do most of the decoding and interpretation yourself, SIGMETs are only meant for aviators and hardcore weather nerds.