Using Climatology to Improve Weather Forecasting for America's Space Program

This paper describes the climatology initiatives to improve forecasting by the Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron (45 WS). The 45 WS provides weather support to America’s space program at Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS) and Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The 45 WS continually strives to improve their forecasts, especially through operational research. Much of this operational research is climatological, since it analyzes the historical databases of the weather sensors at CCAS and KSC. These sensors comprise one of the most densely packed and unique suites of weather observations in all of operational meteorology.

The 45 WS has cooperated with various universities on several lightning climatology projects. The largest project is the sea breeze convection initiation project with Florida State University, sponsored by the COMET/AFWA Outreach Program. This project created three climatology applications: 1) a multi-season sea breeze thunderstorm climatology, 2) thunderstorm predictive signatures under easterly flow regime, and 3) a new RAOB index for weakly driven nocturnal thunderstorms. Internally, 45 WS analyzed the performance of the current local thunderstorm probability tool over several years and created a bias-correction technique, which improved reliability up to 18%. Another project with Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) created a new index for local thunderstorm probability using decades of RAOB and persistence patterns, which has 49.8% better skill than the old tool. Texas A&M University helped tune one of the 45 WS radar rules-of-thumb for lightning forecasting. Another project with Pennsylvania State University, sponsored by NASA, detected new patterns in the local lightning behavior via a multi-year data fusion study of the unique Lightning Detection And Ranging system, radar, and other data sets. AFIT is exploring lightning cessation signatures. AFIT is also building a cloud-to-ground lightning strike distance climatology for the U.S. using 10 years of NLDN data. As another internal effort, 45 WS built a rain-lightning ratio climatology to leverage numerical model forecasts of rain to improve lightning probability forecasts in their daily ‘7-Day Planning Forecast’.

The 45 WS has several convective wind forecasting projects. One project with Texas A&M University created a new multi-season wet microburst climatology, providing objective measurement of the frequency of occurrence, wind speed distribution, along with monthly and diurnal distributions. AFIT evaluated the performance of radar-based tools to nowcast microburst peak speed. Another project with AFIT extends the 45 WS and Applied Meteorology Unit evaluation of RAOB microburst signatures. The GOES/Microburst products are being evaluated by the Florida Institute of Technology and the National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Services using the 45 WS historical weather sensor databases. Additionally, 45 WS is using these historical databases to help the National Severe Storms Laboratory verify and tune their Damaging Downburst Prediction and Detection Algorithm for the WSR-88D radar.

The 45 WS also has forecast improvement initiatives in various miscellaneous topics. AFIT is building two tools to forecast the elevated point winds at the launch pads during winter. Finally, AFIT is developing a climatology for Lightning Launch Commit Criteria, the weather rules protecting against rocket triggered lightning.