The Role of Aeronautical Meteorology in support of Performance Based Air Traffic Management

In November of 2012 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) convened the 12th Air Navigation Conference. This conference is held once every 10 years and the purpose of this conference was to obtain a global consensus on the future functional services that are to be provided for international air navigation. The conference covered the full spectrum of services one of which is meteorology. In defining how future services are to be provided, the Air Navigation Bureau (ANB) over the past several years has been developing a program plan referred to as Aviation Safety Block Upgrades (ASBU) to define how levels of service are to be provided to support an improved performance of the global and regional Air Traffic Management (ATM) System. With regard to aeronautical meteorology ICAO has defined a high level strategic plan to migrate to new or additional services for meteorology with the understanding that these services will support specific ATM improvement steps for specific use-cases. If a State desires to improve the performance of their ATM System for a specific use-case, a minimum set of standards will need to be met. Key to defining these services is ICAO's Global Air Navigation Plan and Flight and Flow Information for a Collaborative Environment (FF-ICE). This paper describes the ongoing work that the Meteorological Section of the ANB has undertaken to work towards the future services. FF-ICE will describe how functional services are being documented for various use-cases, first by means of airspace classifications, and the performance metrics that will need to be defined for these services.