Current and Future Improvements to the Graphical Forecasts for Aviation Tool

NOAA Aviation Weather Center (AWC) has been working on improvements to the Graphical Forecasts for Aviation (GFA) tool over the past several years as a means to give general aviation (GA) users higher spatial and temporal resolution guidance than the legacy text-based Area Forecasts (FAs). The GFA tool is intended to provide the necessary aviation weather information to give users a complete picture of weather that may impact flight This product supports the multi-year effort to cease production of text Area Forecasts (FAs) produced by the United States Meteorological Watch Offices (MWOs) in order to unlock operational aviation forecasters to pursue enhanced products and services that will result in improved weather information for aviation decision makers. The recent improvements to the GFA tool include exploring the capabilities of expanding beyond the CONUS region to cover the additional areas of MWO responsibility. The first expansion targets the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and portions of the Western Atlantic Ocean in order to begin the process of retiring the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean text FAs. In addition to the domain expansion, improvements have been made to the algorithms that derive the clouds and weather parameters in order to produce a more consistent weather picture for the end-user. Future work includes continuing improvement of underlying data as well as domain expansion efforts to cover much of the Pacific including the Hawaiian Islands with eventual expansion into Alaska. Evaluations are critical to the development and expansions to the GFA tool and AWC has partnered with the FAA Aviation Weather Demonstration and Evaluation services group to capture critical end-user feedback.