Expanding ceiling and visibility site forecasting: interesting cases and algorithm improvements

Development of the FAA's National Ceiling and Visibility forecast guidance algorithm has centered on successfully leveraging the strengths of independent input components in order to make more skillful ceiling and visibility forecasts. This paper highlights the challenges we have met with, and the successes achieved, as the application of the algorithm has grown from use at a small number of U.S. sites toward a regional set of locations. This expansion has required that the algorithm evolve to be able to account for the additional variance and extreme conditions as introduced by new local climatologies. An emphasis is placed on the most meteorologically interesting cases found. Finally, improving the efficiency in handling large input data sets without sacrificing the forecast skill improvements achieved at the first handful of test sites is addressed.

This research is in response to requirements and funding by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the FAA.