METAR in IWXXM Slovakia 1.0
Current JSON

Abstract

The service provides access to the latest available METAR reports in the IWXXM format from 5 Slovak airports. The data is supplied by certified MET service responsible for the meteorological support of each specific airport. The service complies with ICAO Annex 3 requirements and supports ICAO Doc 10157 PANS - MET.

Data can be retrieved using: 

  • Subscription (Publish/Subscribe) via AMQP 1.0, whereby the message contains the whole IWXXM dataset;
  • Request/Reply via the OGC EDR API, where the IWXXM data is provided in replies, in a ZIP archive. 
Service Type
SWIM_COMPLIANT
Abbreviation
SHMU AMS
Life Cycle
OPERATIONAL
Business Activity Type
AERODROME_OPERATION
AIRSPACE_ORGANISATION_AND_MANAGEMENT
INFORMATION_MANAGEMENT
SERVICE_DELIVERY_MANAGEMENT
Intended Consumer
AIR_TRAFFIC_SERVICE_PROVIDER
AIRPORT_OPERATOR
AIRSIDE_GROUND_HANDLER
CIVIL_AIR_NAVIGATION_SERVICE_PROVIDER
CIVIL_AIRSPACE_USER
COMMUNICATION_NAVIGATION_AND_SURVEILLANCE_SERVICE_PROVIDER
MILITARY_AIR_NAVIGATION_SERVICE_PROVIDER
MILITARY_AIRSPACE_USER
NETWORK_MANAGER
REGULATED_METEOROLOGICAL_SERVICE_PROVIDER
Information Exchange Category
METEOROLOGICAL_INFORMATION_EXCHANGE
Application Message Exchange Pattern Entity
Request/Reply
FIR ICAO Location Indicator
LZBB
State ICAO Nationality Letters
LZ
Geospatial Categorisation Description
The dataset corresponds to SHMU's area of responsibility as ANSP.
Other
Service Type: METEOROLOGICAL_FEATURE_ACCESS_SERVICE
In-Operation Date
31-Dec-2025
Provider
SHMU

Slovak hydrometeorological institute - national MET ANSP provider

Slovak hydrometeorological institute is Slovak's national meteorological and hydrological service provider, a public sector institution and certified national ATM/ANS Service Provider under certificate 2020-SHMU/01.

Provider Type
REGULATED_METEOROLOGICAL_SERVICE_PROVIDER
Support

The Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute (SHMU) is a specialized organization providing hydrological and meteorological services at the national and international level. The SHMU was established by the former Ministry of Forestry and Water Management on 1 January 1969, and the scope of its activities is currently laid down in Act no. 201/2009 on state hydrological and meteorological services.
The SHMU's activities include the following: monitoring of quantitative and qualitative parameters of the air and water in Slovak territory; collecting, verifying, interpreting and archiving data and information on the condition and regime of air and water; describing developments in the atmosphere and hydrosphere; and issuing forecasts, warnings and other information regarding the atmosphere and hydrosphere. All the aforementioned data, information and other research are made available to the public. The Institute is a holder of ISO 9001:2015 quality management system certificate.
In addition, SHMU acts as an aeronautical meteorological service provider designated by Ministry of Transport and Construction of the Slovak Republic and is certified as an ATM/ANS Service Provider by national Transport Authority.
In accordance with Annex 3 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation and Single European Sky regulations, SHMU provides aeronautical meteorological service in its area of responsibility - Slovak airspace, produces and delivers a wide range of operational meteorological products and services that ensure the safety, regularity, and efficiency of air navigation in Slovakia.

SHMU AMS operates a 24/7 service to the aviation community, providing both regulated and specialized meteorological products such as METAR and TAF reports, AIRMET and SIGMET information, low level area forecasts (GAMET), wind forecasts, radar and satellite imagery, aerodrome warnings and customized ATS forecasts and meteorological warnings.

Point of Contact
Operational Needs for SHMU AMS

The service is provided in accordance with ICAO Annex 3 Meteorological Service for International Air Navigation and ICAO Doc 10157 Procedures for Air Navigation Services - Meteorology (PANS - MET) published in November 2025. It complies with Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/373 (Annex V) and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/116 (Common Project One), as applicable in Slovakia under the Aviation Law Act. 

By delivering meteorological information as required by ICAO and EU law, the service ensures full compliance with the international, European and national regulatory framework governing civil aviation in Slovakia. 

Information Exchange Requirements

The information currently included in the METAR reports as defined in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/373, ICAO Annex 3 and ICAO 10157 PANS-MET.

Capabilities

The service provides high quality, up-to-date, trusted, regulated meteorological information in digital form for use by service consumers within the aviation domain.

Distribute Data

The service distributes the data according to the stored subscriptions and topics.

Request Data

The consumer is able to request the data using OGC EDR.

Subscribe to Data

The user is able to subscribe to data by contacting SHMU SWIM contact.

Information Retainment

Meteorological information is retained for a period of at least 30 days from the date of issue. This relates to the information itself and not the request time of the user.

Authentication

The service ensures client authentication in accordance with SWIM Technical Infrastructure (TI) Yellow Profile 2.0 requirement SWIM-TIYP-0042 by implementing username and password authentication using HTTP Authorization headers with Basic scheme for HTTPS based interfaces, and using SASL PLAIN for AMQP.

The service ensures server authentication in accordance with SWIM-TIYP-0042.

Authorisation

The service ensures that satisfactory authorisation is put in place according to EUROCONTROL Specification for SWIM Technical Infrastructure (TI) Yellow Profile requirement SWIM-TIYP-0070.

Confidentiality

The service ensures point-to-point confidentiality in accordance with EUROCONTROL Specification for SWIM Technical Infrastructure (TI) Yellow Profile 2.0 through the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3. The communication is encrypted by TLS with a certificate issued by the EACP.

Integrity

The service ensures point-to-point integrity in accordance with EUROCONTROL Specification for SWIM Technical Infrastructure (TI) Yellow Profile through the use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3.

Time Behaviour

Under normal operations 90% of METAR messages will be delivered within 10 minutes after the issuing time.

Capacity

Subscriptions are managed with consideration of the capacity of the technical infrastructure. Each connection is rate and connection limited to avoid overload of the system.

Availability

The technical infrastructure is highly available and maintained an availability 99,5%.

Integrity

Integrity is protected by using TLS layer for all the service interface bindings. However the Message Security based on S/MIME 4.0 proposed in SWIM TI Yellow Profile 2.0 is not yet implemented.

Confidentiality

Data delivery is only available for registered users, who need to present their username and password for access to the services using HTTP Authorization header with Basic scheme for HTTP based connections, and using SASL plain for AMQP connections.

AIRM

ATM Information Reference Model

AMQP

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

AMS

Aeronautical Meteorological Service

ATC

Air Traffic Control

ATM

Air Traffic Management

EACP

European Aviation Common PKI

EDR

Environmental Data Retrieval

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol

IER

Information Exchange Requirement

ISRM

Information Service Reference Model

IWXXM

ICAO Meteorological Information Exchange Model

MEP

Message Exchange Pattern

OGC

Open Geospatial Consortium

PCP

Pilot Common Project

SHMU

Slovak hydrometeorological institute

TIYP

Technical Infrastructure Yellow Profile

TI

Technical Infrastructure

Information
Filtering Capabilities OGC EDR

The EDR implementation builds on MET3SG community MET SWIM OGC EDR GUIDANCE. Additionally, it supports OGC EDR filtering mechanisms: cube query using a box parameter, area query with a polygon specified in coords parameter, radius query.

https://swim-eurocontrol.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSS/pages/630194181/MET+SWIM+OGC+EDR+Guidance
Filtering Capabilities AMQP

Simple filtering is achieved using the topic structure of the broker, which determines the type of data recieved. AMQP SQL-like syntax for filters applied to AMQP application properties can be also used by the service consumer to further filter the data received.

https://swim-eurocontrol.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MSS/pages/638156804/AMQP+Message+Structure+in+MET-SWIM
The service provider ensures that the data offered within this service is created by SHMU, a REGULATED_METEOROLOGICAL_SERVICE_PROVIDER.
Service Monitoring

For AMQP subscriptions, regular heartbeat messages are sent to weather.aviation.metar topic at approximately 60-second intervals. Arrival of the heartbeat message indicates that the main subsystems of the service are running.

Typical Request/Reply Behaviour

The typical behavior is following: Client sends request to the OGC EDR interface. The service replies with the appropriate HTTP response. If the request for specific IWXXM data is made, the service returns a zip archive with one or more files containing IWXXM messages.

References
AMQP

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

Revision Save Date
Fri, 01/23/2026 - 12:31
Schema version
v2