The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Aviation Weather Research (AWR) program, in response to several winter-weather related aircraft accidents, has funded the development of a real-time display system that graphically depicts snowfall rate, radar reflectivity, and surface observations of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, as well as short-term nowcasts (0-30 minutes) of snowfall rate and radar reflectivity in the airport terminal area. The system, developed by the Ground Deicing Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is referred to as Weather Support to Deicing Decision Making (WSDDM). WSDDM was demonstrated to ground users and city operations users at O’Hare International Airport (ORD), Chicago, IL and LaGuardia International Airport (LGA), Queens, NY during the winter of 1996/1997 and at LGA during the winter of 1997/1998. In conjunction with these demonstrations the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center Communication/ Navigation/ Surveillance Engineering and Test Division, Weather Branch (ACT-320) conducted meteorological evaluations of the WSDDM system during both winter seasons. The evaluations focused on comparing the 30 minute nowcast of radar reflectivity and snowfall rate derived from the WSDDM Tracking Radar by Correlation (TREC) algorithm with observations of reflectivity and snowfall in the terminal area. Data was collected during real-time and archived winter storm events. Results of the meteorological evaluations will be presented which show moderate underforecasting during the onset of precipitation, reasonable accuracy during the middle of storms, moderate overforecasting during the offset of precipitation, and the implications for airport operations
The 8th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology