Report age
Weather is only as good as it is current. Each METAR and TAF carries a small age pill that counts up live, so a report never quietly goes stale while you're looking at it.
Each METAR and TAF heading carries a small age pill reading HH:MM OLD — how long it has been since the report's own issuance time, not since you loaded the page. It counts up live: leave the page open and the figure advances minute by minute against your device clock, so a report doesn't quietly go stale while you're looking at it. Hours are not capped, so a report from yesterday reads 26:00 OLD rather than wrapping around.
The color tells you, at a glance, whether the report is within its normal update rhythm. The two products update on different cycles, so the thresholds differ:
- METAR — fresh under 30 min, 30–59 min, 60 min or more. Routine obs are hourly (specials come between), so past an hour a new one is due.
- TAF — fresh under 3 hr, 3–6 hr, 6 hr or more. TAFs are normally issued every 6 hours, so the red pill marks one that should have been superseded.
A red pill doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong — a station can simply be slow to post, and the raw report is always shown in full so you can read its timestamp yourself — but it's a prompt to hit Refresh and check whether something newer has come out.
To make the age easy to reconcile against the report's Zulu stamp, a live Local and Zulu clock sits at the top of the page, just above the facility lookup box. METAR and TAF timestamps are in Zulu (UTC); the clock gives you both that and your local time side by side, ticking in real time.
See The lookup buttons for Refresh and the auto-refresh behavior.