Tuesday, 14 May 2002: 3:30 PM
An inferred icing climatology—part I: estimation from pilot reports and surface conditions
The estimation of a climatology of in-flight icing
conditions has been a goal of the icing research community
for a number of years. In-flight icing occurs when
supercooled liquid water droplets impact on an aircraft
during flight, forming a layer of ice on forward surfaces.
The handling characteristics of the aircraft can be
dramatically affected, resulting in a loss of lift in the
most extreme cases. Much effort has been expended to
develop forecasts of icing conditions aloft, but little is
known about the distribution of icing over the continental
United States. However, development of a climatology of
icing conditions is not straightforward, due to the limited
observations of this phenomenon that are available. In
particular, widespread observations of icing are only
available in the form of pilot reports (PIREPs) from
aircraft.
Unfortunately, these observations are sporadic
and non-systematic, and cannot be used directly to provide
a coherent or meaningful measure of the frequency of icing
conditions in many locations.
Thus, a statistical approach is taken in the development of
a model for the icing climatology, using observations
available in the regions of large cities. Icing reports are
expected to be nearly systematic in those regions, because
the air traffic is relatively frequent, and is consistent
from day to day. Surface climatological variables have been
found to be related to the icing observations in these
locations, and these variables are used to develop a
statistical model of icing frequency. The resulting model
is applied to airport locations serving smaller
populations, using their local surface climatological
observations to provide estimates of the true frequencies
of icing conditions. The resulting
frequency estimates provide a more coherent and consistent
climatology of icing than obtained from the PIREPs alone.
Methods to quantify the uncertainty in the estimates are
also investigated and applied.
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