I have never written that the ‘clientraw.txt’ data file was out-of-date.
What I tried to point out was that, once the weather page (such as the ‘ajax-dashboard.php’ script) has been downloaded onto the user’s computer (or phone or whatever) ready for displaying, the webtags data file is first used to ‘populate’ (or fill out) the different weather values.
Then, once the ‘ajaxWDwx.js’ JavaScript has been downloaded onto the user’s computer (or phone or whatever), it starts running. It looks for the ‘clientraw.txt’ data file, decodes it and then creates variables that will replace the values already displayed on the weather page (the near-real-time variables produced by the JavaScript will replace the values that were initially displayed using the webtags data file).
At 05:00 on January 15, 2017, the ‘clientraw.txt’ data file on your weather site, at position ‘49’, contained only three dashes (ie: ‘—’) instead of the current weather description text.
Indeed, activating the “Use the current weather from a METAR” option would add the METAR weather conditions to position ‘49’ of the ‘clientraw.txt’ data file. 