Hazardous weather conditions for the aviation industry are produced by a diverse set of atmospheric phenomena, ranging from mountain wave induced turbulence, volcanic ash detection, and newly developing and mature convective storms. Each category of these aviation hazards has unique temporal, spatial, and spectral characteristics that can be exploited to produce optimal aviation-weather diagnostics and forecasts.

The suite of instruments included on the next generation GOES-R satellite will collect an unprecedented array of measurements of the Earth's atmosphere, which can be combined to improve aviation safety and efficiency. For example, higher temporal and spatial resolution measurements from GOES-R ABI can be used to better monitor and forecast rapidly evolving phenomena such as convective storms and their associated mesoscale flow patterns. Higher spectral resolution measurements from GOES-R HES can be used to observe and characterize the structure of turbulent mountain and convectively-induced gravity waves as well as the composition of volcanic ash plumes.

The focus of this presentation is to demonstrate the potential capability of the GOES-R ABI and HES instruments for improved monitoring of hazardous aviation weather. This will be done through the use of current generation aircraft-based, geostationary, and polar-orbiting instrumentation that have similar characteristics and capabilities to instruments proposed to fly on GOES-R. This research has been conducted as part of the Advanced Satellite Aviation-weather Product (ASAP) and Satellite-based Nowcasting and Aviation Applications Program (SNAAP) at UW-CIMSS, which is focused on using current and future generation satellite instrumentation to study and better understand hazardous aviation weather phenomena.