The Joint Outdoor-indoor Large Eddy Simulation (JOULES) for High Resolution Cloud Ceiling, Precipitation, and Visibility Forecasting for Aircraft Operations

Visibility and cloud forecasting are key components of aviation weather as they have direct implications on the safety and efficiency of aircraft operations. In several domains (such as a land-water interface), clouds form at scales that are not traditionally captured well by mesoscale models. As such, a higher resolution weather model or an empirical parameterization of clouds and visibility is often required. Traditional LES models have proven to be too computationally expensive to be run operationally in support of real-time aviation operations. The Joint Outdoor-indoor Large Eddy Simulation (JOULES) is a full physics atmospheric Large Eddy Simulation (LES) that has been designed to run on a GPU system and can perform high resolution atmospheric simulations significantly faster than real-time. Aeris has built an operational system for inline downscaling of several common NWP models (HRRR, ERA5, & WRF) to a microscale NWP forecasting service (JOULES-NWP) that can provide stakeholders with detailed forecast meteorology at meter-scale resolutions. As a part of this effort, Aeris has performed several verification and validation (V&V) case studies on the microphysics schemes within JOULES-NWP to assess the performance of the model at forecasting the phase change of the hydrometeors. To assess the accuracy of JOULES-NWP, Aeris has compared the model results to radar data and satellite imagery. Aeris will present the results from these V&V studies along with additional case studies highlighting the effects of landuse, land surface moisture content, and terrain on the formation and cessation of clouds and precipitation in the LES.