The Intelligent and Multifunctional eIAWS Nowcasting System (IMnowcastor) and Its Performance at East China Region

As the civil aviation traffic volume kept increasing dramatically in China in the past decades, air traffic delay and diversion caused by convective weather has become a big challenge for the operational air traffic management (ATM) in China. In order to provide the reliable forecast of convective weather and mitigate the impact of convective weather on ATM, IM System Group (IMSG) has applied out Enterprise Integrated Aviation Weather System (eIAWS™) technology and collaborated with the East China Air Traffic Management Bureau (ATMB) to customize various modules to meet the operational ATM needs. The nowcasting module “IMnowcastor”, which provides short-term forecast of convective weather within 3 hours, is a crucial component of eIAWS™. IMnowcastor integrates data from all available sources, including geostationary satellite IR/visible data, weather radar data, and high resolution numerical model data. With the intelligent methods that automatically track, record, and analyze the convective weather, IMnowcastor comprehensively uses regional convective weather patterns and numerical model results to predict the location, coverage, and strength of the convective weather in the next 3 hours. With the initial success in East China, IMnowcastor is further tailored to be a generally applicable and robust software package that can run at different regions, with configurable resolutions and flexible data availability. Based onthe user’s needs, IMnowcastor can generate different products for both the terminal and en-route ATM with better accuracy and reliability than the currently used linear-extrapolation based nowcasting methods. The performance of IMnowcastor at east China region and its impact on the operational ATM is discussed in context.