There are many reasons why a customer may have an urgent time-sensitive shipment they need to get to the destination. The shipment of pharmaceutical items such as vaccines and perishable goods such as food and plants all require the items to arrive without delay. Any delay of important equipment such as engines for aircraft on ground (AOG) can be measured in thousands in dollars for the airline. Critical health items such organs or blood may be a matter of life or death.
Many of these time-sensitive shipments are also temperature sensitive. Active temperature-controlled aircraft containers (ULDs) help maintain constant temperatures while in the cargo load and powered by electricity. Passive containers typically have time constraints associated with them. In either case, it's always advisable to avoid excessive heat or cold where possible.
In large population areas, you may have multiple airports at your disposal to choose from for the departure or arrival airport. If your shipment involves connection points, you have even more airports to consider. It's crucial to pick the airport with no adverse weather conditions and minimize potential delays.
Cirium Weather APIs can be integrated within your systems and applications to provide insight into current and expected weather conditions at airports around the world.
Cirium processes weather information that is published by airports around the world. The FlightStats Weather APIs return current and forecasted weather at an airport. This article focuses on the TAF APIs, but the additional weather APIs are described in the Additional Information section at the end of this document. We assume a common use case is that you are wanting to get a shipment to a destination within the next 24 hours. TAF APIs are the most appropriate for predicting weather conditions at airports for temperature-sensitive shipments within the next 24-30 hrs.
TAF stands for terminal aerodrome forecast and is the standard format used to publish weather forecast information for the area immediately surrounding an airport. TAFs are published by human weather forecasters and are concise strings of coded information. Our processes decode that information and present a more structured and easier to understand result.
A TAF report may contain information such as:
Not every report contains all that information, and differences exist between what information is published depending on the country the airport resides in. For example, the United States does not publish forecasted temperature nor information on icing or turbulence.
Also worth noting, is that a TAF just describes the weather. It doesn’t describe the impact that the weather will have on flights arriving/departing an airport. This document will describe how a TAF report can be interpreted to understand impact better.
Use the following steps to use the TAF for Airport API.
To get started with TAF for Airport API, you first need to get an account, an application ID, and a key. See Get an evaluation account for more details on setting up an account. The TAF for Airport API is available in our commercial or contract plans, and we also offer a trial period where you can try it out.
Once you have your account, follow the instructions on Get started to acquire an application ID and key and to get familiar with the standard FlightStats API platform patterns.
The request to TAF for Airport is simple as it does not contain many options. You need to choose the format (json, xml, or jsonp) you want the information returned in, and the airport you want a TAF report for.
The following request is an example call that gets json data for DFW.
curl --request GET --url "https://api.flightstats.com/flex/weather/rest/v1/json/taf/DFW?appId=YOUR_APP_ID&appKey=YOUR_APP_KEY"
A sample response for the above query follows
The first part of the response contains information about your request. This part may be helpful if the airport codes you provided aren’t found or get mapped to a different airport than expected. The request takes IATA, ICAO or FS airports codes and attempts to automatically map the airport. This can be controlled using the codeType parameter.
The last part of the response is an appendix containing details on the airport. This appendix information can be used to present names in addition or instead of codes, as well as providing additional details about the airport.
The TAF object contains the forecast. The first portion contains the time the report was issued, as well as the time the observations for the report were made. These are usually the same. It also contains the airport code the observation was made for (also in ICAO format) and the original un-decoded TAF report. It then contains a number of forecasts. The top-level object also contains a reportType property which describes the type of report. This is usually ‘Normal' but may also be an ‘Amendment’ or ‘Correction’ if something was published incorrectly or needed to be changed.
The first forecast is the base forecast, and the following forecasts are time periods where conditions in the forecast are expected to change.
Each forecast contains a time period (start and end) that the forecast is valid for. There may be overlap. The type of forecast indicates what is happening with the weather conditions.
Looking through the example, the TAF report contained 4 forecasts (all times UTC):
Each forecast section contains a conditions section which includes information on wind, visibility, sky conditions (or cloud coverage), weather conditions present, icing, turbulence, and barometric pressure. The amount of information available is dependent on the country the airport resides in, what is being forecasted, and ultimately the human that is providing the weather forecast.
To determine the impact to time-sensitive cargo, you need to first find the forecast period where your shipment will be departing and/or arriving. The information within that time period can help predict whether you are likely to experience problems with delays or irregular events such as cancelations or diversions.
Wind speed can be very disruptive. Determining impact can be complicated because it depends on runway configurations, whether the wind is a headwind, tailwind or crosswind and if the flight is departing or landing. Strong headwinds are great for take-offs as it helps lift the flight into the air. They are great for landings as well as they help slow the plane down. Strong tailwinds aren’t so great for take-offs as it means more runway is required to get lift. Landing is more complicated with strong tailwinds as they increase the ground speed of an aircraft and thus the amount runway to slow down. Crosswinds are dangerous in both takeoffs and landing, and wind gusts complicate both as well. Wind shear (a significant change in wind speed or direction in a short amount of time) can be potentially dangerous. High wind speed also affects ground operations.
Wind in combination with other weather conditions (rain, snow, ice, thunderstorms, etc.) also impact the amount of wind that planes can handle.
In general, anything including winds gusts above 20kts could be a potential flag of caution. More serious delays occur around 30kts. Above 45kts and airlines won’t even be able to open the cargo doors. Again, this depends a lot on wind direction, wind gusts/sheer and type of aircraft and runway conditions.
Ceilings are usually defined as the lowest level of broken or overcast skies. Generally speaking, if the cloud ceiling is > 3000 ft above ground level and visibility is > 5 miles, then flights are flying with visual flight rules (VFR) and the airport is generally operating normally. The airport departure/arrival rates begin dropping at lower visibility or ceilings.
IFR requires additional training, equipment and demands more from the pilot. Airport departure/arrival rates drop significantly under IFR. Air traffic control will most likely introduce ground control programs and other measures that hold some flights at the departure point.
Weather conditions (rain, haze, snow, clear skies) clearly affect an airport. Problematic weather should be called out as potentially disruptive. Thunderstorms in particular almost always disrupt flights. Most of the phenomena described in the weather conditions object can be potentially disruptive. Spray, Drizzle, haze and rain are the least impactful. The more intense the condition, the more likely it’s impactful. Heavy rain for example could impact flights. It’s also somewhat dependent on the airport. Light snow in Chicago for example is less likely to have an impact than light snow in Portland, Oregon where the airport is not used to getting snow.
Moderate to high intensity icing or turbulence in the area of the airport may obviously impact flight performance and reasons to indicate to your customer potential problems.
There are several ways TAF information could be displayed. The simplest is just exposing an airport lookup and making the request at that time. Another way is to regularly poll the TAF APIs for updated information for major airports and cache that information within your application. That information could then be used to power a visual like a dashboard, or to mix in with the results of a Schedules API or Connections API call.
Pro tip
As stated earlier, TAF information is usually only published 4 times day (every 6 hrs). As such, if you have a cache of a number of airports, there’s not a need to poll the API at a high frequency. However, amendments and corrections can occur, so consider polling every half-hour or hour just in case.
Cirium processes weather information that is published by airports around the world. The FlightStats Weather APIs return current and forecasted weather at an airport. The weather information published includes:
The FlightStats APIs provide a set of status and positional APIs by flight, airport, fleet, route, or area. They also include schedules, airline reference, airport reference, ratings, delay index, and weather information.
The Airport Delay Index APIs return a measure of the level of departure delays a airport is currently experiencing and are a good complementing set of data for applications display delay information.