Assessing weather conditions at rural airports

Will the weather cooperate or will today end up to be another ground lesson? For these pilots, the process often begins with an hourlong commute—one that carries its own uncertainty.

Alex Witherspoon knows the routine too well. Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Witherspoon trained in Oregon, completing his primary training at Aurora State Airport and Stark's Twin Oaks Airpark—nearly an hour and a half from his home. Twin Oaks is a small, family-owned field surrounded by farmland, ridges, and exposed to several microclimates. It has no automated surface observing system (ASOS) and no on-field certified weather reporting. Fog pools on the runway, and ceilings can sit low for hours. "You're always asking, should I drive? Will I be able to fly?" he said. "It's tricky to find those blue-sky days."

That experience eventually led Witherspoon to build AviationWX.org, an open-source project that gives pilots real‑time visual context and hyperlocal weather at airports without traditional reporting infrastructure. By pairing on‑field cameras with locally sourced weather data, AviationWX translates fragmented inputs into an at‑a‑glance picture designed for use on a phone, tablet, or computer.

Twin Oaks isn't unusual. Across the United States, hundreds of GA airports operate without certified weather stations or FAA Weather Camera Program sites. Pilots often depend on distant METARs, regional forecasts, or phone calls to friends who might be nearby. In many areas, the closest official weather report may be 60 miles away, separated by ridges, valleys, or mountain passes that can create entirely different conditions.

This gap between regional weather products and what's actually happening at the runway threshold contributes to an aviation safety divide. Large Class B airports benefit from extensive instrumentation, redundancy, and continuous monitoring. Small fields—despite seeing hundreds of operations a day—often have little or no coverage. Installing FAA-grade weather infrastructure is expensive. A commercial ASOS system typically starts around $40,000, followed by monthly and yearly fees. For many rural airports that simply isn't feasible.

AviationWX is not designed to replace certified systems. Instead, it works to address gaps between broad regional data and local conditions by deploying low-cost cameras and basic weather sensors at underserved airports, validating those inputs and presenting them in a format intended for pilots.

At Scappoose Airport near Portland, Oregon, for example, local pilots and volunteers worked together to mount cameras on an existing pole beneath a windsock. Power and wireless internet were provided on site, cables were buried by hand, and services were sponsored locally. Total cost: approximately $900. During that time, Scappoose's official ASOS was out of service for nearly three months while replacement parts were on order. The locally installed sensors provided interim observational data for pilots and forecasters monitoring conditions. "We had two sources of weather," Witherspoon said. "ASOS is one. But we still had an answer while it was down."

AviationWX pulls from multiple sources, including on-field cameras, local sensors, METARs, ASOS, and broader weather networks. The system emphasizes validation in addition to aggregation. Each data point is evaluated independently for plausibility and consistency. Temperature, pressure, wind, and age of an observation are checked against known bounds. "Certain pressures and temperature cannot exist. If reading falls outside those limits, they are rejected. If I can't confirm it, you see no data," Witherspoon said, describing the project's safety-first design. During outages, AviationWX applies the same logic, automatically detecting sensor or network failures and removing affected data until systems are restored.

Visual information is provided through time-lapse imagery, updated as frequently as every 60 seconds. This approach reduces the cost and reliability challenges associated with live streaming video while allowing pilots to scroll back up to 24 hours of imagery with minimal loss of detail. At Pacific City State Airport, for instance, king tides periodically submerge the runway under several feet of water. A downward-facing camera shows the runway disappearing—conditions no METAR or forecast could convey.

Security is handled through direct device authentication and encrypted transmission. Each camera authenticates directly to the network and embeds metadata inside every image. Time stamps are verified at the source, and data integrity is rechecked throughout the pipeline. The platform does not require user accounts or passwords. At sites unable to support direct connectivity, a small bridge device can collect local data and forward it securely, allowing installations to remain outside airport IT environments when required.

AviationWX also displays critical notams directly on airport pages, including closures and temporary flight restrictions, providing additional operational context.

The platform is optimized for mobile devices. On a phone, pilots immediately see conditions, temperature, density altitude, and pressure. Units can be adjusted to match flight instruments, and a night mode preserves dark adaptation. Nearby participating airports are displayed automatically. "I'm not trying to replace electronic flight bags," Witherspoon emphasized. "This is supplementary. It's a cross-check."

The project remains open source and intentionally minimal in its technical dependencies. Safety-critical calculations are publicly documented, and anyone can audit the math. Airports can run their own instances on inexpensive hardware with data available through a public application programming interface. The goal, Witherspoon said, "isn't ownership—it's coverage."