Definition
A trained, certified person who personally observes weather conditions at an airport and reports them, rather than relying on automated equipment. The observer measures or evaluates elements such as cloud height, visibility, present weather, wind, temperature, dew point, and altimeter setting, and issues these observations for use in aviation reports such as METARs and ATIS broadcasts.
Plain English
A real person whose job is to look at the sky and the instruments at an airport and report what the weather is doing, instead of letting an automated system do it.
Context Anchor
Seen in airport weather and Automatic Terminal Information Service discussions; the observer's report may help form the weather information pilots hear on the airport broadcast.
Why Pilots Care
A manual observer can report things automated systems often miss or misread, such as distant thunderstorms, virga, tornadoes, or unusual cloud types. Knowing whether an observation came from a human or a machine helps you judge how complete the weather picture really is.
Intuition Check
Do not read “manual” as “written by hand.” Here it means the weather is observed by an authorized person rather than only by automatic equipment. Do not read “observer” as any person looking outside. In this context, it means someone qualified to make official aviation weather observations.
Example Sentence 1
At fields with a manual weather observer, the ATIS may include remarks about distant lightning that an automated station would not detect.
Example Sentence 2
Pilots received current visibility from the manual weather observer during the equipment outage.