IEM :: Download PIREPs

The IEM attempts to process a feed of Pilot Reports (PIREPs). This processing is done via the PyIEM Library. Sadly, there is not strict coherence to a format specification and so a number of reports are simply unparsable. This archive should not be considered 'complete'.

The PIREP parsing library that decodes the location information into a latitude and longitude is crude. It does not properly account for magnetic north and may also have errors with VOR baseline locations. This download interface provides the raw undecoded PIREP reports, so users that have more sophisticated location calculators are encouraged to process them for yourself.

Due to filesize and speed, you can only request up to 120 days of data at a time! If you request data with the spatial filter, you can download longer periods of data. Backend documentation exists for those wishing to script against this service.

Select time interval

(Times are in UTC.)

Time Interval						Spatial Filter (Optional)
	Year	Month	Day	Hour	Minute	Enable Spatial Filter Filter reports to a Latitude + Longitude circle of degrees to point East and North
Start:
End:

Shapefile DBF schema:

Field 0: Type=C/String, Title='VALID', Timestamp in UTC
Field 1: Type=C/String, Title='URGENT', Was this an urgent PIREP
Field 2: Type=C/String, Title='AIRCRAFT', Reported Aircraft type
Field 3: Type=C/String, Title='REPORT', The PIREP Report
Field 4: Type=C/String, Title='ICING', The icing /IC portion of the PIREP
Field 5: Type=C/String, Title='TURB', The turbulence /TB portion of the PIREP
Field 6: Type=C/String, Title='ARTCC', The ARTCC identifier, when applicable.
Field 7: Type=N/Double, Title='LAT', Latitude
Field 8: Type=N/Double, Title='LON', Longitude 
Field 9: Type=C/String, Title='PROD_ID', The IEM NWS text product identifier.

Archive notes:

Archive starts December 2000
11 Feb 2025: An issue was found with the location of the navaid FLM. This resulted in PIREPs referencing that navaid being placed in Florida. This has been corrected and the archive was reprocessed to fix this issue.
31 July 2024: Going forward, a IEM product identifier field has been added to allow the retrieval of the raw NWS text product that the report was extracted from. Hope to backfill this, at some point.
30 January 2023: Added extraction of icing and turbulence portions of the PIREP. Added the associated, when applicable, ARTCC identifier for the location of the PIREP.
23 September 2022: The archive was backfilled for as long as raw data was available from NCEI. This backfilling covered a period between early March 2003 and 20 January 2015. Confidence is not great that this backfilling is complete and PIREPs from Canada are mostly missing. Again, due to reasons above and the poor format of this data, this archive is not the greatest, but is certainly unique!
21 April 2021: It was kindly pointed out that location offsets are in nautical miles and not miles. The archive was reprocessed to properly use nautical miles.
8 January 2020: Previously, the ingest process would not consider PIPEPs with unknown / bad location details. These are now included in the CSV option with a "None" column for the latitude and longitude. On a typical day, less than five PIREPs have unknown location details.

Publications Citing IEM Data (View All)

These are the most recent 10 publications that have cited the usage of data from this page. This list is not exhaustive, so please let us know if you have a publication that should be added.

Splitt, M., M. Hennard, et al. 2021, Survey of General Aviation Pilot Reports (PIREPs) Conformity, Consistency, and Quality. J. Operational Meteor., 9 (6), 76-88. https://doi.org/10.15191/nwajom.2021.0906
Barber, K., G. Mullendore, et al. 2018, Out-of-Cloud Convective Turbulence: Estimation Method and Impacts of Model Resolution. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. Volume 57, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-17-0174.1