Severe convective weather has a well-known and disruptive influence on aviation. This is true both for en-route air traffic flow and traffic around the terminal area. As future demand on the national airspace increases, the requirement for coherent, relevant, and up-to-date weather information will also increase. Successful and effective flight planning requires accurate weather analyses and skillful 0 - 6 h forecasts.

The focus of this study is on determining characteristics of convective weather that are most disruptive to en-route air traffic. From an aviation point of view, it matters how much of the airspace is blocked by hazardous weather, the weather's spatial organization (e.g., cells vs. line; orientation; gaps between cells or porosity), and temporal evolution. Moreover, we address how these weather characteristics vary with spatial scale, and the extent to which numerical weather prediction models are able to predict such information as a function of the model's spatial resolution.