Comment from Richard Schmidt

It is understandable that outdated terminology requires updating; however, I would caution against the blanket use of weather reports from fully automated weather stations as "alternative weather sources approved by the Administrator." As a Contract Weather Observer that augments an automated station, I am very familiar with the limitations of automation. Automated reports are frequently misleading. For the first fifteen days of June, for example, manual augmentation changed the flight conditions (VFR to MVFR, MVFR to IFR, etc.) twenty-seven times. There were two-hundred and seventy augmented hourly observations during this time, meaning about ten percent of the observations would have provided incorrect flight conditions if human augmentation had not taken place. This represents only part of the augmentations that were made. There were also an additional two hundred and twenty-for special observations. In short, with four hundred ninety-four total observations there were one hundred thirty-three required augmentations for significant weather conditions. There were also many unreported additional augmentations that did not change the flight conditions or report significant weather but provided a more accurate report, such as changing a cloud layer from few to scattered. To summarize: Automated reports have significant limitations. They are generally good at pure numerical data, such as wind, temperature and altimeter, but frequently incorrect on visibility and sky conditions.