The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has implemented automated systems such as DOTS (Dynamic Ocean Track System) and ATOP (Advanced Technologies and Oceanic Procedures) to automate many Air Traffic Control (ATC) tasks and to provide decision support for ATC personnel, with the further goal of improving on-time performance and system capacity. These systems would benefit from the inclusion of predictions of weather hazards and flight level winds; providing hourly wind updates to the FAA for the North Pacific region is the goal of the work described in this abstract.

The U.S. Navy's regional model COAMPSŪ (Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System) and data assimilation system NAVDAS (NRL Atmospheric Variational Data Assimilation System) are being used for this work. While NAVDAS has been used operationally for the Navy's global model NOGAPS (Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System) since October 2003, it is only over this past year that it has been implemented operationally for the various COAMPSŪ areas. The work to be presented includes modifications made to NAVDAS to run with one- and three-hourly update cycles (rather than the six-hourly update cycle in operational use) and improvements in data utilization for the data-sparse North Pacific. Since flight-level winds are the focus in this project, the work to improve data utilization has begun with a re-examination of the data assimilation procedures in use for automated data from commercial aircraft and from satellite feature-track winds.