Southern California is home to the worlds fourth busiest airport - Los Angeles International Airport, the United States busiest general aviation airport in Van Nuys, and major regional airports at Burbank, Ontario, and Santa Ana. Restrictions on flight operations in Southern California due to lowered ceilings and visibilities associated with coastal stratus can have major regional and national impacts on air traffic operations. Prior to the advent of high-resolution numerical models and asynoptic upper air data sources, forecasts of the formation, movement, and dissipation of coastal stratus and the associated ceilings and restrictions to visibility often had to be indirectly inferred.
ACARS data has allowed for improvements in the monitoring of spatial and temporal changes in low-level temperature profiles. This has resulted in improved monitoring of the depth of the coastal marine layer with resulting in improvements in short-term forecasts of the movement of coastal stratus and the associated ceilings and visibilities. The additional vertical and horizontal resolution provided by the Eta-10 has, for the first time, allowed for explicit forecasts of marine layer depth and movement of coastal stratus leading to improved forecasts of ceilings and visibilities.
Examples of how ACARS data and the Eta-10 can improve forecasts for ceilings and visibilities for coastal Southern California airports will be shown for a Catalina eddy event and a non-eddy event along the Southern California coast during May 1998.
The 8th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology