An interactive gridded aviation weather database: results of a pilot project

The aviation industry is heavily dependent on accurate and timely information on current and forecast weather conditions for flight planning and safety. The demand to have access to weather information quickly and in an intuitive and easily understandable fashion is ever increasing. Advancements in computer sciences and in numerical modeling of the atmosphere have brought forward the capability of responding to the demand. Numerical weather prediction models can ingest an ever-increasing amount of data from various sources and produce high-quality gridded forecasts in relatively short periods of time. Computers powerful enough are available at relatively low costs to process impressive amounts of information produced by the numerical models, and coming from other sources, and generate quickly, user tailored information products in graphical formats. Computer applications are available to build user friendly interfaces and make the information available on networks. This opens a whole era of new aviation weather products thus allowing a quick and intuitive understanding of actual and forecast aviation weather conditions

In that context the Canadian Meteorological Centre, in collaboration with Nav Canada, has developed an interactive aviation weather database (AWeD) to be the core component of an aviation weather display system intended to be used as a briefing-aid tool. The domain of the aviation database covers all of Canada, adjacent waters as well as a significant portion of United States. The gridded data is available at a 24 km horizontal resolution, at every 1000 feet in the vertical from mean sea level up to 40 000 feet and at a 3-hour time resolution from zero to 48 hour projection times. The database is updated twice per day (00 and 12 UTC) in real time. In its current state the aviation weather database includes : temperatures, winds, icing, turbulence, cloud fraction, relative humidity, vertical velocity at all flight levels. It also includes : tropopause pressure and temperature, freezing level, total cloud cover, instantaneous precipitation rate at the surface and station pressure. Real-time observation data, METAR, SPECI, FA, SIGMET, AIRMET and PIREP, are also incorporated in the database.

The database gridded aviation-impact variables can be interactively queried on Internet through a user-friendly interface which allows users to enter flight parameters, such as departure and arrival points, alternate airports, check points along the planned route, estimated elapse time of the flight and flight level. Series of meteorological products, all tailored to each particular flight, in plan view and/or vertical cross-section along the route can then be requested. Approximately eighteen pilots have been selected to test the system in real time and in a real operational environment and to provide feedback. Accesses to the system were monitored and statistics gathered. The results of the project show that the gridded database is a useful tool for pre-flight planning. Most available products were judged as good as or better than the conventional products. The main conclusion of the project is that the interactive gridded database is mature enough to be implemented for operational usage.