how can you get live METAR data ?

You can use PHP (yet another web programming language) to do this trick.
Checkout my home page at http://www.brenorbrophy.com/ to see the results. I
retrieve the METARs for some of my local airports, the airport name gets
color coded depending on the conditions (LIFR/IFR/MVFR & VFR), the time get
color'd red if its more than 1 hour old. I also get the TAF for a couple of
local airports. I use this to get a real quick over view of the local area
weather.

For the non-programmer, PHP is a scripting language that runs on a web
server. When somebody views the web-page the script is executed and it
outputs HTML code which is displayed on the web-page. Whoever is hosting
your web-page needs to allow PHP scripts to run. Now I'm not a PHP genius, I
hacked a piece of code called PHP Weather (version 2.1) which is available
at http://phpweather.sourceforge.net/.

Quick overview of what I did.

1) Downloaded and unziped PHP Weather. Put it in a directory on my web page
called weather.
2) Created a file called wx.php (my hack) and put it in same directory
3) Added an inline frame to my homepage as set wx.php as the source, the
HTML for this is:

iframe src="weather/wx.php" name="wx bar" width="600" marginwidth="0"
height="170" marginheight="0" align="middle" scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"/iframe

Here is wx.php file - it should be obivious how to modify it for a different
set of METARs and TAFs (Hint look at the arrays called $Airport & $tAirport)

html
head
titleUntitled Document/title
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"
/head

body
table width="596" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="0"
bordercolor="#CCCCCC" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"
tr
td width="60%" valign="top"
?php
//error_reporting(E_ALL);

/* We need the GET variables: */
extract($HTTP_GET_VARS);

/* Load PHP Weather */
require('../weather/phpweather.php');

if (empty($language)) $language = 'en';

$weather = new phpweather();
//$weather-properties['verbosity'] = 5;

$language = 'en';
require(PHPWEATHER_BASE_DIR . "/output/pw_text_$language.php");
$type = 'pw_text_' . $language;
require(PHPWEATHER_BASE_DIR . "/output/pw_images.php");
$icons = new pw_images($weather);
/*
** Airports array holds list of airports for METAR retrival
** tAirports array holds list of airports for TAF retrival
*/
$Airport = array ("KRHV","KWVI","KMRY","KAPC","KSCK","KSAC"); // For METAR
$tAirport = array ("KSJC","KMRY"); // For TAF

echo 'table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1"';
echo 'trtd colspan="2" valign="top" bgcolor="#99CCFF"font
face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"strongMETAR
'.gmdate("dHi\Z")."/strong/font/td/tr\n";
foreach ($Airport as $icao) {
$weather-set_icao($icao); // Set the airport code
$metar = $weather-get_metar(); // Get the METAR report
if($metar!='') { // If I've got a valid METAR then
$parts = explode(' ', $metar); // Break into parts so we can color
various bits
$num_parts = count($parts); // Count the parts
$time = $parts[1]; // Extract the time issued part
$vis = $parts[3]; // Extract visibility
$weather-decode_metar(); // Decode it so we can check visability &
ceiling
/*
** Check for flight conditions
** LIFR (Low IFR) is vis 1SM &|| ceiling 500' - Color ICAO purple
** IFR is 1SM vis 3SM &|| 500' ceiling 1000' - Color ICAO red
** MVFR (Marginal VFR) is 3SM vis 5SM &|| 1000' ceiling 3000' -
Color ICAO blue
** VFR is vis 5SM & ceiling 3000' - Color ICAO green
**
** Ceiling is altitude of lowest cloud type of BKN or OVC
*/
$vis = $weather-decoded_metar['visibility'][0]['miles']; // Get
visibility
$layer = $weather-decoded_metar['clouds']; // Get the cloud layers
$ceiling = 999999; // Init ceiling value
$group_num = 0; // Init cloud group value (there could be up to 3
cloud groups)
foreach ($layer as $key=$group) { // For each cloud group
/*
** We only care about OVC or BKN layers
*/
if (($group['condition'] == 'OVC') || ($group['condition'] == 'BKN') ||
($group['condition'] == 'VV')) {
if ($ceiling $group['ft']) { // Look for the lowest ceiling
$ceiling = $group['ft']; // Records it if lower
$group_num = $key; // Record the cloud group it occurs in
} // end of found a lower ceiling
} // end of condition OVC || BKN || VV
} // end of checking all cloud layers
if (($vis = 1) || ($ceiling = 500)) {
$flight_condition = 'LIFR';
($vis = 1) ? $vis_flag = true : $vis_flag = false;
($ceiling = 500) ? $ceiling_flag = true : $ceiling_flag = false;
}
elseif (($vis = 3) || ($ceiling = 1000)) {
$flight_condition = 'IFR';
($vis = 3) ? $vis_flag = true : $vis_flag = false;
($ceiling = 1000) ? $ceiling_flag = true : $ceiling_flag = false;
}
elseif (($vis = 5) || ($ceiling = 3000)) {
$flight_condition = 'MVFR';
($vis = 5) ? $vis_flag = true : $vis_flag = false;
($ceiling = 3000) ? $ceiling_flag = true : $ceiling_flag = false;
}
else {
$flight_condition = 'VFR';
$vis_flag = false;
$ceiling_flag = false;
}
echo 'trtd valign="top"font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif" size="1" ';
switch ($flight_condition)
{
case 'LIFR': $color="#FF00FF"; break; // Purple color
case 'IFR' : $color="#FF0000"; break; // Red color
case 'MVFR': $color="#0000FF"; break; // Blue color
case 'VFR' : $color="#009900"; break; // Green color
default : $color="#000000"; // Should never happen but in case
leave it black color
}
echo 'color="'.$color.'"strong'.$icao."/strong/font/td\n"; //
print the airport code and close the cell
/*
** Now we want to alert the user if the METAR data is old. So we will color
the time stamp red if
** its is more than 1 hour old.
*/
echo 'td valign="top"font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif" size="1" '; // Start the cell and set the font
if ($weather-metar_time time()-3600) { // METAR is more then 1
hour old
echo 'color="#FF0000"';
} else { // METAR is less than 1 hour old
echo 'color="#000000"';
} // end of METAR time check
echo $time.'/font';
/*
** print remainder of the METAR
**
** Plan to add color high-light of Vis or cloud causing !VFR flight
conditiond
*/
echo 'font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"
size="1"'.substr($metar,12,strlen($metar))."/td/tr\n";
} // end of valid METAR
} // end of FOREACH loop on array of airports

echo "/table/fontbr\n";
?
/td
td width="40%" valign="top"
?php
$text = new $type($weather);
foreach ($tAirport as $icao) {
$text-weather-set_icao($icao); // Set the Airport code
$taf = $text-weather-decode_taf(); // Get and decode the TAF
if($taf['taf']!='') { // If I've got a valid TAF then
$parts = explode(' ', $taf['taf']); // Break into parts so we can
color various bits
$num_parts = count($parts); // Count the parts
$time = $parts[1]; // Extract the time issued part

echo 'table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="1"
cellspacing="1"';
echo 'trtd valign="top" bgcolor="#99CCFF"font face="Verdana,
Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"strongTAF '.$icao."
".$time."/strong/font/td/tr\n";
echo 'trtd valign="top"font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif" size="1"';
while(list($i,$period) = each($taf['periods2'])) {
echo $period['data']."br\n";
} // end of while list of TAF periods
echo "/td/tr\n";
echo "/table";
} // end of valid TAF
} // end of FOREACH loop on array of airports

?
/td
/tr
/table
/body
/html