Workload Sharing, Semi-Automation and Roving TAF

The Canadian Meteorological Aviation Centre (CMAC) is an operational weather centre with generally 11 24-7 operational forecast desks responsible for issuing graphical forecasts, SIGMETS, and TAFs for more than 180 different airports. This equates to a TAF to forecaster ratio that is very high in comparison to other countries. With Canada's large geographic area, it is nearly impossible for all the TAF sites to have weather at the same time. The CMAC takes advantage of this reality using software called Roving TAF. Supervisors “rove” TAFs from one forecaster, to another, facilitating a more equitable distribution of workload. This assures that when a forecaster has significant weather, they have fewer forecasts; hence more time to produce them. “Roving workload is expected to occur more in the future as “AutoTAFs” are introduced to handle the more innocuous weather situations.