IEM :: Download PIREPs

Archived Pilot Reports (PIREPs)

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.

Select time interval

(Times are in UTC.)

Time Interval						Spatial Filter (Optional)
	Year	Month	Day	Hour	Minute	Enable Spatial Filter Filter reports to a Latitude + Longitude circle of degrees to point East and North
Start:
End:

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 20 Jan 2015
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.