1955–2019: How NWP Has Evolved to Improve Safety and Efficiency for Aviation (Invited Presentation)

Requirements of the aviation community have been a major driver over the last century for improvement of forecasting capabilities. In this talk, we will follow the history of NWP including data assimilation, an increasing component of forecasting over the last 60 years, and specifically how aviation requirements and guidance have motivated and benefitted from much of that progress.

This talk will be drawn from the 100-year anniversary AMS monograph and a chapter entitled, “100 years of progress in forecasting and NWP applications.” That chapter focused on 8 different aspects of forecasting over the last 100 years, but this review talk will focus specifically on the aviation application of forecasting and the evolution of NWP. Aviation needs for improved prediction of hazards (icing, turbulence, convective storms) and overall guidance (winds aloft, terminal conditions) have focused especially on short-range prediction. Therefore, aviation needs have driven overall NWP development toward improved data assimilation with more frequent initialization, higher resolution, and improved representations of clouds. At the same time, transoceanic aviation needs have forced improved global model forecast accuracy. The talk will also look to the future of continuous earth-system ensemble prediction with new observations (including from aviation) to improve guidance for aviation and other decision-making communities.