Enhancements to the Global Weather Hazards Project

The Global Weather Hazards (GWH) Project has proven that the capability exists to uplink and display weather products in the flight deck that are accurate, timely and useful for strategic decision making by commercial pilots. For the past few years, a suite of standard and convective hazard products have been uplinked and displayed on the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) as an overlay on the navigational charts. Standard products (i.e., Significant Meteorological Information (SIGMETs) and Airmen's Meteorological Information (AIRMETs) for convection, turbulence and icing as well as Volcanic Ash Advisories) are displayed to give hazard information to the pilots. In addition, two convective weather products, called the Cloud Top Height (CTH) and the Convection Diagnosis Oceanic (CDO), are uplinked for display on the EFB. These two products are computed over a global domain using geostationary satellite data and lightning data. The products are available in near-realtime and have a 15 min update rate using the latest available data.

Enhancements made to the GWH system that effect the CTH and CDO products are presented. Changes in the constellation of geostationary satellites have been made by several nations as new satellites replace old ones. Two examples in particular, the replacement of GOES-13 with GOES-16 and the future replacement of GOES-15 with GOES-17, will result in much simpler processing steps within the GWH system as well as considerable improvements in resolution and accuracy of the products. Also, the GOES-16 and GOES-17 include the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument, whose data will be input into the CDO as an additional source of lightning data that augments the ground-based lightning data. Other enhancements include new data quality routines to improve product quality and changes in the methodology for storm motion vector computation, among others. Results for all enhancements will be shown.

In this paper, we briefly describe the overall GWH project, including the weather products, the engineering design of product creation and dissemination, communication requirements for product service, the product display, and user feedback. Advances made to the GWH processing system will be the primary focus.