Winter Weather Nowcasting at Airports

Airport operations are significantly impacted by winter weather conditions such as snow, snow pellets, freezing rain, freezing drizzle, and low ceiling and visibility. Operational impacts include planning and conduct of runway and airport road clearing, planning and conduct of aircraft deicing, and planning and conduct of aircraft traffic flow on the ground and in the air. Very short term forecasts (0-6 hours) of these winter weather conditions can help the safety, efficiency, and capacity of airports during winter operations. This talk will review some of the progress and challenges related to winter weather short term forecasting, including the use of real-time snowgauges. Recent efforts to improve snowband forecastins using a high resolution forecast model combined with radar data for initialization will also be discussed.