Aviation Weather Center: Current and Future Modeling Needs

The Aviation Weather Center is unique in that it has a broad mission to support safe and efficient travel in the National Airspace System (NAS) by providing accurate and timely aviation weather information. This involves the forecasting of aviation impact variables from the global scale to the local terminal scale; including, but not limited to: turbulence, icing, clouds and visibility, convection, low-level wind shear, and winds at the surface and aloft. The majority of AWC products and services are focused on the prediction of hazardous conditions less than 24 hours in the future; however, future efforts involve pushing aviation relevant forecasts out to 8 days with increased spatial resolution.

Global efforts at the AWC and the Aviation Weather Testbed (AWT) include evaluation of the new FV3 global modeling system with a focus on convection, icing, and turbulence areas. Since AWC is one of the two World Area Forecast Centers (WAFC), this evaluation is unique in that it requires collaboration with the Met Office, who supports development for WAFC London. The two WAFCs are working to build a global aviation weather common operating picture for the World Area Forecast System. Regional efforts include the expansion of the Graphical Forecast Aviation (GFA) tool beyond the contiguous United States, and using continental-scale native resolution model forecasts to depict aviation weather hazards with increased vertical resolution for modeling wind and cloud threats in a three-dimensional space. Local level efforts include examining high resolution, sub-1 km model nests to improve cloud depiction at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where small scale changes in clouds in the airport approach affect operational efficiency and can have cascading effects on the entire NAS. Finally, ongoing AWT work involves building a consistent set of aviation weather guidance in partnership with National Blend of Models developers to yield a better starting point to achieve a common operating picture in support of consistent aviation forecasts across offices in the National Weather Service.