Development of a Semi-automated TAF Production System at MSC

The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) has the responsibility to delivers and produce aviation weather forecast services and products to NAV CANADA via its two Canadian Meteorological Aviation Centres or aka CMACs. Generally, 12 forecasters are responsible for issuing TAFs for 180+ different airports, over a very large geographic area. The advantage of a large geographic area is that it is nearly impossible for all the TAF sites to have weather at the same time. Also, our client NAV CANADA, has a trademark to reduce its operational costs on a continuous basis and to offer new and innovative products to their clients. Hence MSC is developing au automatic TAF production system based on the Regional Deterministic Prediction System (RDPS resolution of 10 km), the new pan-canadian High Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS resolution of 2,5 km) and on algorithms developed by our aviation laboratory and CMC. This automatic TAF production system will generate TAFs, during the first phase, over areas where non significant or fair weather conditions are expected in order to gain some efficiencies in TAF production and to allow forecasters at CMAC to focus more over areas where there's significant weather to our users and to develop new products with the same workforce. The next phase will focus on generation of TAFs in IFR conditions in order to assist forecasters and provide them a draft TAF version. We will make a presentation of what we have done, where we are and what are the next steps before the first phase will be considered completed.