3b.2 Designing an aviation weather climatology and meteorological database in the context of an aviation risk model

Tuesday, 9 May 2000: 2:00 PM
Diana L. B. Boyd, NCAR, Boulder, Colorado; and B. G. Brown, D. Osborne, and D. Ross

The risk associated with aviation depends heavily upon many different aspects of climate, weather and weather prediction. A joint effort is underway to quantify a measure of risk inherent in certain aviation situations, including controlled flight into terrain and in-flight turbulence. Implicit in this work is analysis and application of weather and climate data utilized by the aviation community. This research includes the creation of a thirty-year aviation-specific climatology for 237 cities in the United States and 7 South American cities, as well as the development of a database of meteorological conditions and forecasts (METARs and TAFs). Use of the resulting information requires an evaluation of the relationships between aviation and weather, in addition to a reasonable approach for assimilating the data into an overall risk model. Expert elicitation has been used to construct aviation and flight scenarios of interest. Further, a modified expected climate/weather measure has been devised to bring the risk portion of the weather component into the aviation risk scale. This method has proven to be useful in the evaluation of risk using the climatology, forecasts and known weather, respectively, to estimate the risk related to a far future event, a near future event and a past event.
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