Development of a Nowcast Modeling System to Support Army Aviation Forecasts

To support the U.S. Army's aviation missions, rapid-update cycling Nowcast numerical weather predictions are required for operations in dynamic modeling domains (time and space) with rich to limited observation data available for model initialization. The WRF-ARW model has been adapted for the Army to provide gridded forecast output for use in aviation weather tools. The WRF-ARW's Four Dimensional Data Assimilation method has been implemented to integrate and apply observations from various conventional and unconventional battlefield sources into the model's initialization processes. This tailored version of the WRF-ARW, which takes advantage of any and all observation data sources, is called the Weather Running Estimate-Nowcast (WRE-N) modeling system. WRE-N is designed to run hourly, with flexibility to run in sub-hourly to six-hourly update cycling modes, producing 3-6 hour forecasts in 30-minute or hourly increments at horizontal grid point resolutions of a few km to 500m. WRE-N output is designed to support a variety of aviation-tailored web services which generate grids of atmospheric impacts on aircraft platforms. Such weather impacts grids are also used to calculate optimized routes in 4D space which avoid adverse atmospheric conditions and other obstacles during mission execution.