The term I used to see a lot was CAVU (visibility unlimited). Two items for Dan P: If you want a sense of what clear skies with crappy viz looks like, go up in the summertime east coast haze and fly towards the sun. Clear as can be with close to zero viz. Awful flying weather, usually. And, in terms of reading METARs and TAFs: About 95% percent of what's in them is stuff you see all the time in your area and you just know it. I personally didn't recognize the BLDU = Blowing dust (although I probably could have figured it out), but that's not something you're going to see a lot outside of a desert area. I remember when there was a big Forest Fire on the East Coast about 8 years ago the "FU" (not that kind of FU) started showing up in the METARs. FU=Smoke (from Fumee).

Actually you are partly right. You interpreted the time right as being the 13th of the month and being at 15:45z but instead of having the conditions be expected at that time. That is the time that the TAF was issued or made....then the other times tell you when to expect what weather at what time. Also, I don't know where that airport is but zulu time will not correspond to regular time unless you are in one timezone; and I think that is in Europe somewhere. For example. Here in the States in Central time; 15:45z time is 10:45 am local time. You have to correct for whatever time zone you are in. each time zone will have a correction such as this...In Central standard time zulu time conversion will use this formula, (local time + 5 = zulu time). In other time zones that "5" will change to another number and in some cases that "+" sign will change to a "-". Google has a bunch of time converters.

Ok thanks, Doha (OTBD) is out in the Middle east Kinda near Dubai so lots of blowing dust and sand at certain times can make for some interesting low vis approaches at max crosswind limits. It's +3hours ahead of zulu.

For anyone with an iPhone or iPad, there's a great (free) app called AeroWeather that gives METAR/TAF reports for hundreds (no doubt thousands) of airports around the world. You can view the METARs/TAFs in raw format, or 'decoded' (ie in plain english). It's very easy to switch between the two, and thus is a great way of learning how to decode them.I use it all the time in FS when flying with ASE.

TEMPO was new to me as well. Thanks much for the info.

If you own any of the HiFiSim weather products, look in the back of the manual of any particular version; there's always a great breatkdown of the METAR & TAF strings and all the options that can come with a weather statment. It's where I learned to read 'em.