The IEM attempts to process a feed of Pilot Reports (PIREPs). This processing is done via the PyIEM Library. Sadly, there is not strict coherence to a format specification and so a number of reports are simply unparsable. This archive should not be considered 'complete'.
The PIREP parsing library that decodes the location information into a latitude
and longitude is crude. It does not properly account for magnetic north and may
also have errors with VOR baseline locations. This download interface provides
the raw undecoded PIREP reports, so users that have more sophisticated location
calculators are encouraged to process them for yourself.
Due to filesize and speed, you can only request up to 120 days of data at a time! If you request data with the spatial filter, you can download longer periods of data.
Related: CWSU Center Weather Advisories Graphical AIRMETs SIGMETs TAFs
Shapefile DBF schema:
Field 0: Type=C/String, Title='VALID', Timestamp in UTC Field 1: Type=C/String, Title='URGENT', Was this an urgent PIREP Field 2: Type=C/String, Title='AIRCRAFT', Reported Aircraft type Field 3: Type=C/String, Title='REPORT', The PIREP Report Field 4: Type=N/Double, Title='LAT', Latitude Field 5: Type=N/Double, Title='LON', Longitude
Archive notes:
- Archive starts March 2003
- 8 January 2020: Previously, the ingest process would not consider PIPEPs with unknown / bad location details. These are now included in the CSV option with a "None" column for the latitude and longitude. On a typical day, less than five PIREPs have unknown location details.
- 21 April 2021: It was kindly pointed out that location offsets are in nautical miles and not miles. The archive was reprocessed to properly use nautical miles.
- 23 September 2022: The archive was backfilled for as long as raw data was available from NCEI. This backfilling covered a period between early March 2003 and 20 January 2015. Confidence is not great that this backfilling is complete and PIREPs from Canada are mostly missing. Again, due to reasons above and the poor format of this data, this archive is not the greatest, but is certainly unique!