The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Domestic Aviation Forecast System (DAFS) will generate more detailed forecasts of evolving icing and turbulence risks, giving pilots real-time intelligence about changing weather conditions along their flight path.
NOAA said the weather forecast system will provide improved prediction of two aviation hazards that pose threats to flight safety and create anxiety among passengers: airplane icing and turbulence.
DAFS, scheduled to go into service “at the end of March,” covers the contiguous United States and was developed with funding from the FAA’s Aviation Weather Research Program.
“This is the culmination of extensive research and years of work that gets right to the heart of our aviation forecast mission: supporting passenger safety and the aviation industry,” said Terra Ladwig, acting chief of NOAA Global Systems Laboratory’s Assimilation, Verification, and Innovation Division.
“The DAFS is another example of how NOAA continuously works with the FAA to deliver the most accurate, timely and useful aviation forecasts,” said Joshua Scheck, aviation support branch chief for NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center. “Improving prediction of turbulence and icing will strengthen NOAA’s ability to provide critical flight safety information to the FAA and the aviation community.”
To help the FAA generate flight paths that route planes around dangerous weather, the National Weather Service’s 122 Weather Forecast Offices provide more than 3,000 regularly scheduled forecasts to approximately 700 airports daily. The NWS Aviation Weather Center issues more than 300 additional aviation weather forecasts daily, along with 55,000 in-flight aviation weather warnings per year on average. The AWC also distributes nearly 12,000 automated aviation forecasts daily in a variety of formats as a Meteorological Watch Office.
The new aviation forecast system is based on NOAA’s most advanced operational regional forecast model, the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh, which was specifically designed to track rapidly evolving severe weather events. It provides an updated forecast every hour on a 1.8-mile surface grid with 50 vertical slices through the atmosphere.
What makes the HRRR unique is that it ingests three-dimensional radar data every 15 minutes. This allows meteorologists to see ongoing precipitation and predict the formation of individual thunderstorms—common causes of flight-level icing and turbulence—with superior accuracy.
Previously, icing and turbulence guidance were generated from hourly updating numerical weather models on a coarser 8-mile surface grid.
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