Aviation Weather Web Site (AWWS)

In August 2001 the Aviation Weather Web Site (AWWS) has been made available to the aviation community. NAV CANADA owner and operator of Canada's civil air navigation service (ANS) provides fundings for AWWS development and maintenance. Development and operational support is done at the Canadian Meteorological Center (CMC), the national center for telecommunications, weather modeling, and emergency response services of the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC).

AWWS is an Internet based application that provides aeronautical weather information (forecasts and observations) from an Interface for flight planning purposes. The available products are conventional alphanumerical observations such as METAR, TAF and SIGMET etc. Graphical products are also available: SIGWX, North Atlantic Turbulence, Graphical FA, FD Winds and Temperatures etc. Recently Canadian NOTAM bulletins were added to the suite of available alphanumeric products. Not only product based requests can be made on AWWS, but different weather folder types are also available. Users can create a Route, Regional or Local request type and save it in their personal account so that the request can be retrieved rapidly upon request in real time.

Development is still going on AWWS. Soon a Weather Mail (Wx Mail) service will be provided to registered users in order to automatically deliver to them their previously saved weather package at day and date of their choice. To be made available in 2004 is an Internet Flight Planning System (IFS) that will allow users to file flight plans on line. In the Fall 2004 a new component will be added to the site. This new system called Automated Supplementary Enroute Weather Prediction (ASEP) will allows users to directly query a central gridded aviation weather database for most of the aviation-specific meteorological products they require. The gridded data is available at a 24 km horizontal resolution, at every 1000 feet in the vertical from mean sea level up to 40 000 feet and at a 3-hour time resolution from zero to 48 hour projection times. The database is updated twice per day (00 and 12 UTC) in real time. In its current state the aviation weather database includes: temperatures, winds, icing, turbulence, cloud fraction at all flight levels. It also includes: tropopause height, freezing level, and mean sea level pressure.

The presentation will show the main characteristics of the AWWS web site mainly the interface and product outputs.