FAA NextGen Weather Product Suite

NextGen Weather is a multi-agency partnership between the FAA, NOAA, NASA, and DoD, dedicated to meeting critical aviation weather needs. The FAA NextGen Weather program currently under acquisition consolidates and significantly improves weather processing within the agency, generates new products unprecedented within the meteorological community that are specifically tailored to meeting operational Air Traffic Control needs, and modernizes the agency’s weather data communications.

In this talk, we will provide details of the new and improved FAA NextGen Weather products, including rapid update (25 sec) 3-D radar mosaics with 1000 ft vertical resolution over a domain covering CONUS, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and Canada; safety-critical terminal wind shear products; highly accurate detections of Convective Turbulence (via Growth Trends); and 0-8 hour predictive products with operationally-oriented confidence metrics. FAA NextGen Weather data formats comply with standards set by the Open Geospatial Consortium, including use of NetCDF4 for gridded products and WXXM for non-gridded products. Examples of the new products shown on the NextGen Weather Aviation Weather Display will be included. Mechanisms for early NextGen Weather product access for aviation interests within the meteorological community will be discussed.