A Quality Assessment of the Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) for Aviation

Costly flight delays, cancellations, and diversions stem from missing METAR observations that are required by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in order to ensure the safe operation of aircraft. In 2015, the FAA requested the National Weather Service’s (NWS) Environmental Modeling Center provide temperature pseudo-observations derived from the Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) at airport locations throughout the United States (i.e., airport weather status) to serve in lieu of missing temperature reports, thereby mitigating the impacts of missing temperature observations. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in determining if a similar approach could be applied to additional analysis parameters from the RTMA, an hourly, two-dimensional variational analysis system.

The purpose of this work is to perform a quality assessment of the RTMA sensible weather elements, such as ceiling, visibility, 10 m wind, and surface pressure, for consideration of inclusion in the airport weather status list. Retrospective, data denial experiments are performed to characterize how much quality is lost in the analysis at airports of interest when their respective observations are denied, with the experiments spanning a two-week period for each season.

Disclaimer: This research is in response to requirements and funding by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the FAA.