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Look, I’ve spent two decades sneaking through perimeters that cost more than my house, and the easiest way in is still the door someone left propped open with a brick. In the intelligence world that brick is often a 60-character weather string broadcast in plain text every 30 minutes. METAR—yes, the same boring aviation weather you ignore on the departures board—has been ratting out Russian warplanes since Crimea 2014, and most defense contractors still treat it as meteorological muzak. Today we’re gonna weaponize that apathy.

Audience check: If you work military & defense contracts, red-team recon, SOC shifts that bleed into overtime, or you’re that one analyst who keeps getting asked “where did the Flankers go?”—this walkthrough is for you. Grab coffee, silence Slack, and let’s turn forgotten weather logs into russian warplane osint gold.

Why METARs Matter More Than Missile Telemetry

Military airfields file METAR/SPECI reports because pilots like breathing and not exploding. What most people miss is that the header field contains the ICAO station identifier, wind vector, temperature, dewpoint, QNH pressure, and—here’s the kicker—a “remarks” section stuffed with runway state, friction coefficients, and trend modifiers. When a base suddenly swaps from routine “RMK QBB140” to “RWY12 CLOSED BLU” or adds “TEMPO” turbulence, you just witnessed either construction or a higher-tempo op. Multiply that by 30 bases across the Western Military District and you get a movement curve that satellites sometimes miss because, well, clouds.

And the best part? It’s 100% legal open source intelligence. No warrants, no risky satellite tasking, no burning a $4 million UAV sortie.

Need a primer on layering OSINT with classified feeds? Our write-up on bridging OSINT and classified intelligence shows how to fuse these unclassified crumbs into products that briefing officers actually trust.

Deconstructing a METAR in 30 Seconds

Let’s rip one straight from Rostov-on-Don (URRR) during last year’s exercise surge.

That single RETS remark is the difference between “civilian day” and “combat readiness.” Rostov doesn’t add it for weekend Cessnas. When 14 Russian bases light up with RETS inside 48 h, you can bet Kuznetsov isn’t the only thing steaming.

Automated Collection Without Getting IP-Banned

Step 1: Harvest. NOAA’s aviation weather FTP and Ogimet (Slovakia) both refresh globally every 20–30 min. Curl with a rotating residential proxy pool keeps you polite. Store everything raw; storage is cheap, regret is expensive.

Step 2: Parse. Use the python-metar library or any parser that keeps the remarks section intact. Regex for keywords:

• RETS, RMK QBB, RWY XX CLSD, TEMPO FU (smoke = possible live fire)
• Wind shear alerts—often correlate with heavy transports or Backfire take-off mass

Step 3: Enrich. Cross-reference against NOTAMs and ADS-B dumps. When a base files a 24-hour runway closure yet ADS-B shows a steady stream of Il-76 MLAT hits, congratulations: you just caught a deception op.

Step 4: Alert. A simple diff between today’s and last week’s METAR set will surface anomalies. Pipe the diff into Slack or, better, into Kindi—our AI-driven OSINT platform that auto-links airfield activity to satellite imagery, Telegram chatter, and vessel transits so your team gets one fused picture instead of 400 browser tabs.

If you’re already thinking about SOC integration, our guide on integrating OSINT to prioritize alerts and unmask real threats in SOC environments walks through the plumbing you’ll need.

Case File: Crimea 2022 Build-Up

Between 11-Jan and 17-Jan 2022, we (and by we, I mean a laptop in my dining room) pulled 1,247 METAR records from nine Crimean and nearby Russian bases. Here’s the cliff notes:

• Bases that normally filed once every 3 h started hourly filings—classic pre-staging.
• Three fields inserted “RWYXX CLSD BLU” with RETS, indicating arresting gear crew on standby.
• Wind remarks shifted from routine 270 to 300–330, meaning runway ops switched to the secondary strip—typical when you need max ramp space for strike packages.
• SPECI reports (the 15-min rapid update) spiked from 0 to 42 per day.

Two weeks later, satellite imagery confirmed Su-30SM and Su-34 revetments under construction exactly where METARs flagged closure. You can’t hide a runway swap from a $0 weather string.

Counter-Deception: When Ivan Starts Lying

Russia knows we watch. Sometimes they spoof NOTAMs, file fake closures, or recycle old METAR timestamps. Your defense is triangulation:

1. Compare temperature/pressure hashes against civilian ports 50 km away—meteorology is hard to fake across large areas.
2. Correlate ADS-B/Mode-S with the closure times. Aircraft still taking off = fake closure.
3. Look for linguistic drift. A Ukrainian base once “accidentally” filed in Cyrillic remarks—dead giveaway of proxy spoofing.

For deeper adversary profiling tricks, the advanced adversary profiling post has my full bag of painful lessons.

Scaling to Theater-Level Intelligence

Single airfield snapshots are cute; pattern-of-life across 50 bases wins contracts. Build a time-series heatmap: anomaly score = (METAR delta + NOTAM delta + ADS-B delta) / seasonal baseline. Feed that into a Grafana dashboard. When the score jumps 2σ above baseline, cue satellite tasking or SAR collection. Congratulations, you just turned free text files into a trigger for million-dollar assets.

TL;DR for the Executive on the Call

• METAR is free, global, and updates every 20–30 min—perfect for persistence.
• Remarks section hides runway state, closures, and mil-specific keywords like RETS.
• Pair with ADS-B/NOTAM for counter-deception; pipe into Kindi or your fusion stack.
• We caught the Crimea surge a month before mainstream press using nothing but weather logs and a spreadsheet.

FAQ

Q1: Are METARs admissible in court or just for tip-offs?

They’re unclassified open source intelligence and have been cited in multiple IMTs (investigative military tribunals). Always validate with imagery or comms intel before action.

Q2: How fast should I poll before someone blocks me?

Every 15 min from rotating residential IPs keeps you under NOAA’s radar. Ogimet appreciates an email heads-up for heavy pulls; they’re hobbyists, not NSA.

Q3: Can adversaries encrypt or stop broadcasting?

They can withhold public METARs, but civilian airliners still need weather. Total blackout equals no civilian traffic—another data point in itself.

Q4: What if the airfield uses Russian domestic code instead of ICAO?

Map via the official Russian AIP or use our Kindi lookup table; domestic codes like XLLL map cleanly to ICAO for most mil bases.

Q5: Is this only about Russia?

Nope. We’ve tracked PLA Navy surge ops in Hainan and even NATO exercises. Weather logs are democratic—they rat on everyone.

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