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Old March 31st 05, 10:19 PM posted to ne.weather,sci.geo.meteorology
[email protected] famartin1@yahoo.com is offline
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First recorded activity by Weather-Banter: Jan 2005
Posts: 52
Default Lazy FAA Observer at Trenton-Mercer Airport

Gentlemen,

I apologize for my previous statements regarding deception.

However, I still maintain that, at least at the time I specified, the
ASOS at KTTN was not accurately portraying the weather at the airport,
based on nearby observations, evidence from the issued observation from
KTTN, radar imagery, and information from several family members who
live within 2 miles of the airport.

I think that perhaps, a change in reporting practice from the ASOS
would be helpful for the user and observer. For example, when the ASOS
is standalone (AUTO), the following distress codes are issued at the
end of the observation during an instance such as what occured on March
8:

SNEMM PWINO FZRANO

However, when the ASOS is in augmentation mode, the PWINO FZRANO are
not included, with only the SNEMM indicating a problem with the
sensors. This is also the case with other sensor distress codes, such
as TSNO.

I believe it would be in everyone's interests if this was changed so
that, even while the ASOS is being augmented, the sensor error codes
were displayed. This would alert the augmentor that there are problems
with the unit severely affecting performance requiring augmentation,
while alerting the end-user to be more skeptical of the observation.

=====
Raymond C. Martin, Jr.
Associate Meteorologist, AccuWeather Inc.- http://www.accuweather.com/
New Jersey Expressways and Tollways - http://www.njfreeways.com/
Ray's Winter Storm Archive - http://www.njfreeways.com/weather/