What is METAR and how is it read? I was reading an article about TAM Airlines Flight 3054 crash and I saw the following:

METAR


  
  SBSP 172200z 35008kt 7000 -ra Bkn008 Ovc070 15/14 Q1018
  SBSP 172200z 35008kt 7000 -ra Bkn008 Ovc070 15/14 Q1018
  SBSP 172100z 34008kt 6000 -ra Bkn009 Ovc070 16/14 Q1018
  SBSP 172030z 32009kt 7000 -ra Bkn013 Ovc080 16/14 Q1018
  SBSP 172000z 31012kt 8000 -ra Bkn016 Ovc080 17/14 Q1018
  SBSP 171900z 34009kt 9999 -ra Bkn016 Bkn080 18/15 Q1017
  


Questions:


What is METAR?
How is it read?
What is the difference between the International METAR codes and the
North American METAR codes?
METAR is a Meteorological Aerodrome Report which is for a specific place, at a specific time.

The first line is a report from Sao Paulo at 22:00 on the 17th.

You can use a service such as this one to decode METAR reports.

The rest of the lines are more reports for different time and days.

The groups are:

 SBSP       Reporting station ICAO code
 172220Z    Day of the month (17) and current time in UTC (2220) (Z for Zulu time)
 35008KT    Wind from 350 degrees true at 8 knots
 7000       Horizontal visibility on the ground in metres
 -RA        Current weather (RA = rain), the minus indicates light, plus indicates heavy
 BKN008     Broken clouds at 800 feet
 OVC070     Overcast clouds at 7000 feet
 15/14      Temperature 15C, dew-point 14C
 Q1018      regional atmospheric pressure 1018hPa / US systems use inHG / others use millibars