METAR and TAF for FDBS
Weather reports for Big Bend Sugar E Airport are published under the ICAO code FDBS. A METAR is an observation of current conditions, usually issued every 30 or 60 minutes; a TAF is a forecast for the airport area, typically covering 9 to 30 hours.
The decoder breaks the FDBS report down into its parts: wind direction and speed including gusts and variability, visibility (including CAVOK and directional minimum visibility), weather phenomena by WMO code, cloud layers with their bases, temperature and dew point, QNH pressure, and the resulting flight category - VFR, MVFR, IFR or LIFR - using FAA thresholds.
Not every airport issues its own reports; many smaller airfields have no weather station. If no current data is available for FDBS, check the nearby airports listed below.
Reports always use UTC (the Z suffix). The Africa/Johannesburg zone stays at GMT+02:00 year-round, so converting to local time is always the same shift.
The closest airports in the database, measured in a straight line from the reference point, are Matata Airport (Big Bend) (FDBM, 4 km), Ubombo Ranches Airport (Big Bend) (FDUB, 7 km), Nsoko Airport (FDNS, 17 km). When no report is available for FDBS, they usually give the best approximation of conditions in the area.
