Science Upgrades to the World Area Forecast System

The Global aviation industry is rapidly evolving, with increased volumes of traffic, increased capacity demands and the need to limit the environmental impacts of travel. Consequently, the provision of accurate/detailed meteorological information is becoming even more essential for the safe and efficient management of airline and airport operations – particularly in mitigation of issues caused by weather – protecting aircraft and reducing delays to passengers and cargo alike. Underpinning much of this is the World Area Forecast System (WAFS), provided by the London and Washington centres respectively, whose capabilities are currently undergoing significant upgrades that promises improved prediction of en-route hazards. These upgrades, focused on atmospheric turbulence, cumulonimbus cloud, and in-flight icing will see the transition of services to a fully probabilistic offering, as well as the provision of a new high-resolution (0.25 degree) deterministic severity-based forecasts of turbulence and icing (replacing the previously used ‘potential’ metric). With the delivery of the deterministic products due by 2020, and the probabilistic products due by 2024, we will report on these key developments – providing both an overview of the new operational diagnostics and their validation, presenting preliminary results from initial trials involving the ensemble data – enabling users to avoid en-route hazards more safely and efficiently in the future.