On 2007-02-15, Jay Honeck wrote:
Because lets face it, METAR code is a foreign language which originated
from aliens from a another planet

For sure!

What I find hilarious is when the FAA says they use these
abbreviations because of "limited computer capacity"...

'Limited computer capacity' is nothing to do with hard disk space. A
consistent set of abbreviations used worldwide vastly simplifies the job
of making all the weather computers talk to each other. If each computer
in each country simply used natural language for METARs, gathering all
the observations for the weather models would become an utter nightmare.
You'd have thousands of conditions in code - translating French words
for weather, translating British English, American English, Spanish -
the code would quickly become a complex unmaintainable mess.

If you want METARs in natural language, well, thanks to the consistent
set of abbreviations that is standardized, it is trivial to have a
computer translate it into your first language and own timezone. That's
a FAR better solution than having the raw METAR data in plain English
and then having the computer translate natural language into something
it can put into the models. You don't have to ever read a raw METAR if
you don't want to. Even ancient telnet DUATS will translate raw METAR
into English and your local timezone.

Your hilarity is merely caused by lack of knowledge in this case.

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