pkorzeniewski> Why there're so many abbrevations? Is there a technical reason for it or is it just a convention among pilots?
It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive.
After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text.
It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable.
If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time.
PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...
Probably for the same reason Digital Video is filled with acronyms. Medical notes also have the same pattern.
Basically, specialized fields have their own vocabulary that evolved super fast relative to the evolution of the English language. It would be very cumbersome to use the full terms when trying to communicate.
At any rate, the original hyperlink to the world wide web page for this article has beautiful joint photographic expert group pictures—or perhaps were they portable network graphics, I didn't check the hyperterxt markup language to verify. And the cascading style sheet layout is quite clever to present these pictures. ;)
It's a [frustrating] convention among pilot data services. METARs, TAFs, FDs, etc are all coded. Many of these systems date back 30+ years, when telecom equipment and data transmission was much more limited and expensive.
After a short while, it's relatively transparent to decode the abbreviated weather and other items that we use a lot. And of course, anyone who is remotely fluent in English can decode the minimal abbreviations in the quoted text.
It's also somewhat easier to scan certain reports (TAFs and Winds Aloft forecasts) as the abbreviations tend to keep the data in a visually scannable almost tabular form, so you can easily see when conditions are becoming more/less favorable.
If it were free/cheap to update all the systems that generate and all the systems that process, interpret, archive, and/or retransmit that data, there's no reason to keep the abbreviation culture. It's far from free, so inertia will keep it the way it is for a long time.
PS: I don't know why that comment is dead. It seems a perfectly reasonable question and your account isn't banned...