The Incorporation of High Resolution Climatological Data into Environmental Tactical Decision Aids

The environment can significantly impact the performance of weapons systems and how they are used in a theater of operations. A tool has been developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) to enable operators to assess the impact of environmental factors on the performance of military systems, subsystems, and components. The ARL system, the Integrated Weather Effects Decision Aid (IWEDA) takes weather and environmental data and compares them to a set of rules that relate environmental parameters to weapons system performance. The results from the IWEDA system can enable operators to identify regions and time periods when weapons system performance may be "marginal" or "unfavorable." The DoD Air and Space Natural Environment (ASNE) Executive Agents have developed a program, the Advanced Climate Modeling and Environmental Simulations (ACMES), to produce high resolution gridded data for use in generating high resolution climate statistics from simulated weather observations at any desired location around the world. It is intended that data from the ACMES effort could be used by commanders to assess the environmental effects on operations. This paper describes an effort to use data generated from ACMES to drive the IWEDA rules on system performance. The results from this effort are high resolution, gridded values of weapons performance statistics that can be used to support the mission planning cycle. We shall describe the process used to generate the environmental parameters required by the IWEDA rules from the ACMES data and present results from a proof-of-concept demonstration effort.