Ground School - Weather Services

This one is even harder than just pure weather. The average person may see their local weather guy give the weather but did you ever wonder where he gets it? There are several places a pilot can go to get weather. The FAA wants you to get your flight briefing from them. There are 3 different kinds of briefings.

First you have a standard briefing. It covers everything you should want to know about weather. Next is an abbreviated briefing that is used to update an earlier briefing. Finally, there is an outlook briefing. This is used when your departure time will be more than 6 hours in the future.

The things contained in a weather briefing are pretty cryptic unless you know how to interpret it. It's also acronym soup (in case you are hungry for this kind of thing). There are METARs, TAFs, PIREPS, ASOS, AWOS, AIRMETS, SIGMETS, DUATS, DUAT, Winds Aloft, TWEB, HIWAS, Weather depiction charts, Radar summaries and last but not least Low-level Significant Weather Prognostic Charts. That's enough to tongue tie the best auctioneer.

As a side note, I decided to take a practice test. Since I'm only half way through, I thought it would be dismal but was pleasantly surprised when I scored about 78%. To score 80% or better, you can't miss more that 12 questions out of 60. I missed 13. I'll go over the ones I missed and go back and work on those sections (and even the ones we haven't covered).