Federal Aviation Administration User Needs: Space Weather R2O2R (Invited Presentation)

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the United States Meteorological Authority for Aviation to the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization. As such, the FAA establishes policy, procedures, and requirements for aviation weather information within the United States National Airspace System (NAS). The primary “customer” of FAA’s Office of NextGen Aviation Weather Division (AWD) is the safety and efficiency of the NAS. For decades, the FAA has primarily established weather research requirements for the NAS based on research-to- operations (R2O) for terrestrial weather through the AWD’s Aviation Weather Research Program. Now the AWD has taken steps to provide better opportunities for NAS users to state their needs for terrestrial and space weather issues for FAA consideration via a consolidated operations-to-research (O2R) requirements process, which will be the focus of this presentation.