Benchmarking In-Flight Icing Detection Products for Future Upgrades

The Advanced Satellite Aviation-weather Products (ASAP) project has the goal of providing improved guidance products to research groups developing on a variety of aviation weather hazards. ASAP recently began collaborating with the FAA’s Aviation Weather Research Program’s InFlight Icing Product Development Team to determine which satellite-based cloud products would most benefit that team. To assess current capabilities of the Current Icing Potential (CIP) and NASA LaRC GOES-Derived Cloud Products (GDCP) in diagnosing inflight aircraft icing conditions, a benchmarking exercise was performed. The evaluation had two components: overall comparison with icing pilot reports (PIREPS) and selected case studies using field project data. The specific questions addressed included:

• What are the current probabilities of detection, areas and volumes covered, and efficiencies of the products? • How well do the products diagnose expected icing severity? • What weather scenarios do the products handle well? Poorly? • Where could GDCP provide greatest benefit through incorporation into CIP?

The verification period for the PIREP-based verification was October 2003 through March 2004. Valid times of 1500 and 2100 UTC were chosen to coincide with high air-traffic times and avoid the solar terminator in the satellite data. Verification volume was over the CONUS from the surface to 18,000 ft. GDCP products included cloud top and base, cloud phase, ice or water diameter, ice or water path, and icing risk. Data from recent field research programs (AIRS-2, THORPEX, WISP04, NASA GRC icing missions) were used to examine selected cases and provide insight on the behavior of the products.

Overall statistics and example case studies will be presented to address the questions posed above. Future directions of ASAP for inflight icing product improvement will be included in the talk.