TAF Daily 18 Jul 2026

How to play TAF Daily

TAF Daily gives you one real terminal aerodrome forecast and five questions about it. A TAF covers a block of hours instead of a single moment, so the puzzle is less about reading one value and more about tracking how a station expects its conditions to change.

The briefing is on screen from the moment the page loads, and 5 multiple-choice questions come one at a time. Nothing is hidden behind a reveal: the whole game is reading the thing in front of you.

Each answer is graded on the server, so which option is right - and the reasoning behind it - is not in the page until you commit to one. The explanation that follows covers only the part you were just asked about; the full decode arrives with the last answer, when there is nothing left to give away.

A forecast reads differently from an observation

A TAF opens with a validity window written as two day-and-hour stamps, and then stacks change groups on top of the base period: FM for a rapid switch to new conditions, BECMG for a gradual change, TEMPO for conditions expected to come and go, PROB for a stated probability. Reading one means holding a timeline in your head rather than a snapshot.

The questions follow that shape. They ask what the validity window means, what the flight category of the base period is, whether the ceiling deteriorates across the forecast, the worst category reached at any point, what a particular change group is saying, whether thunderstorms are explicitly forecast, the lowest visibility in the period, and the strongest wind forecast at any point. When a forecast is too plain to support one of those, a reserve question takes its place, so there are always five questions of five different types.

How the questions are built

The questions are not baked into the shipped file. It carries the raw forecast plus a decoded summary that never leaves the server, and the five questions are generated from the raw forecast on the server side. They are deterministic: the same puzzle number always produces the same questions, the same wrong options and the same order, for everyone.

The decoded forecast never reaches the browser before you have answered. Each answer comes back with an explanation, and the full period-by-period decode arrives with the last one. Difficulty on the daily puzzle is set by the day of the week, Monday easiest through Sunday hardest, and archive replays rotate the same seven levels by puzzle number. It shows up as distractors placed nearer the correct answer.

Where the forecasts come from

The sources are NOAA / NWS Aviation Weather Center via aviationweather.gov, which is US federal government work and public domain, and OurAirports, public domain, for airport names and ICAO identifiers.

The parser behind the game was checked offline against the Aviation Weather Center's own decoded forecast periods before launch, and the cases where they disagreed were documented as source quirks rather than quietly smoothed over. The game ships a pool of 205 forecasts, 45 of them dated into the live calendar and the rest held as an archive.

The decode is a teaching tool, not a briefing

The explanations and the final decode are produced by this site's own TAF parser, and it shares its body-decoding code with the METAR side, so wind, visibility, weather and cloud groups read the same way in both games. What sticks after a few rounds is the ability to look at a wall of groups and see where the bad hour is.

TAF Daily is a learning game. Its decoded forecasts are for practice only and must never be used for real flight planning or operational decisions. Always use an official aviation weather source.

Where the data comes from

• NOAA / NWS Aviation Weather Center via aviationweather.gov - US federal government work, public domain
• OurAirports - public domain (airport names, ICAO identifiers)

TAF Daily is built on 2 openly licensed sources, frozen into the game before it goes out. The licence is named next to each one above, and the same list, with the per-record detail, is on the TAF Daily attribution page.

The writing you get on the reveal is a full decode written by the site's own TAF parser. It is quoted or generated from the source, never written by a language model while you play, and it carries its own credit and licence line wherever it appears.

The pool holds 205 reports and the calendar covers 423 days. A scheduled job appends a new day from the live feed every morning, so the report you decode was filed within the last day or so. The day rolls over at midnight UTC.

Nothing is lost when a day ends. Every puzzle that has already run stays playable in the archive, and its answer, with the same reading you would have got by finishing it, is published the day after it ran.

Every past answer · Sources and licences in full · TAF Daily on Gamecove

Questions

Is it the same puzzle for everyone?

Yes. One forecast a day, the same five questions for every player, rolling over at midnight UTC. Past days stay playable in the archive.

Do I need an account?

No. Nothing is stored on a server. Your streak and stats are kept in your browser's local storage, so they belong to that browser on that device.

How is this different from METAR Daily?

A METAR is an observation of what is happening now, so its questions are about a single moment. A TAF is a forecast for a stated window, so its questions are about change over time: trends, probability groups and the worst point in the period.