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It’s precipitating … uh, something

January 29, 2006 @ 12:33 By: gordon Category: General

Kathy’s travelling back from Peterborough today, so I thought I’d check out the weather there.

METAR CYPQ 291700Z AUTO 09012KT 1SM -UP OVC000 OVC010 OVC016 OVC025
01/M00 A2967 RMK PRESFR SLP056=

In all the METARs and SPECIs I’ve looked at over the last decade or so, I have never seen a precipitation type of -UP. I had to dig up my A.I.P. and check the Significant Present Weather Codes table (MET 3-31 in my out of date A.I.P.). It says UP stands for Unknown Precipitation. This is an AWOS-only code, presumably because sometimes the automatic weather widget can’t tell what’s falling out of the sky.

A few minutes later, this SPECI was issued:

SPECI CYPQ 291715Z AUTO 08011KT 1SM -RA BKN000 BKN010 BKN016 OVC024
01/M00 A2965=

It appears that the unknown precipitation was most likely rain and not something more exotic like frogs.

One Response to “It’s precipitating … uh, something”


  1. Paul Tomblin says:

    At least it wasn’t raining up!



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