Weather is a major cause of aircraft accidents and incidents and the single largest contributor to air traffic system delays. The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP), through improvements in the knowledge of current weather conditions and reliable forecasts, has been striving to improve aviation safety, increase system capacity, and enhance flight planning and fuel efficiency. Recently, the AWRP approved for use weather products whose goal it is to improve the forecasts of convective weather and inflight icing in the U.S. The National Convective Weather Forecast (NCWF) provides a plotted map which depicts the current location of convective hazards and where they will be an hour later. This product makes it easier for commercial and private pilots to chart their way around weather hazards. For inflight icing, the goals of the Integrated Icing Diagnosis Algorithm (IIDA), and the Integrated Icing Forecast Algorithm (IIFA) products are to develop an hourly gridded depiction or forecast of inflight icing with the highest possible horizontal resolution, based on integration of operational model output with real-time sensor data.

This paper describes the NCWF, IIDA, and IIFA weather products that were recently reviewed by the FAA's Aviation Weather Technology Transfer Board, and how these products will benefit the aviation industry.