Sending Legacy Aviation Weather Products into Retirement

The Weather Information Modernization and Transition (WIMAT) group is an effort led by the Aviation Weather Division of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that works in close coordination with the National Weather Service (NWS) to help modernize and improve FAA decision making. WIMAT uses a team-based approach to enhance consistency among aviation weather products, reduce conflicting information and transition toward higher resolution information. One of the main WIMAT goals has been to transition weather products from Traditional Alphanumeric Code (TAC) or text-based toward graphical weather information. Recently, the WIMAT team has been working the upcoming retirement of Outside of Contiguous United States (OCONUS) Area Forecasts (FAs) for the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and Hawaii regions. The Alaska FA will not be addressed at this time. The retirement of the OCONUS FAs is a continuation of the effort to retire the legacy text-based FAs that started with the retirement of the Contiguous United States (CONUS) FA back in 2017. Retiring this product completes the transition from the legacy text-based product toward the higher resolution Graphical Forecast for Aviation (GFA), which has been operational for these OCONUS regions since 2019 and 2020. The planned retirement for the OCONUS FAs is scheduled for late January 2025.

This presentation will provide a brief overview and history of WIMAT as well as background on the OCONUS FAs. Additionally, the briefing will outline the steps in the process to retire a legacy aviation weather product with a focus on the upcoming retirement of the OCONUS FAs. This process includes coordination between the various lines of business across the FAA and the NWS, the Safety Risk Management (SRM) process, updates to documentation, and the socialization of the change to users. The presentation will conclude with the next planned steps in the retirement process such as the official notification of this change by the NWS and FAA. The conclusion will address the challenges for the potential future retirement of the text-based Alaska FA that the WIMAT team is currently assessing as upcoming work.