1. Digital Services for Aviation

2. What are Digital Aviation Services
Adding aviation elements to the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD)
Provide hourly graphical forecasts of ceiling and visibility out to 36 hours
TAFs are generated from the database with forecaster oversight
What are digital aviation services?
Adding aviation elements to the national digital forecast database. These elements do not currently exist on a national level at NDFD.
Provide hourly graphical forecasts of ceiling and visibility which represent prevailing conditions for the next 30 hours. This does not include temporary forecasts. Those will be issued as needed.
In order to keep the process manageable for the forecasters, they are forecasting flight categories, rather than observations. This also simplifies the process such that, the regulatory TAFs fall directly out of the grids, with little or no post editing.

3. Why Digital Aviation Services?
Moves toward the NextGen requirements:
Digital ceiling and visibility
Build a national ceiling and visibility grid to be used by AWC
Consistent aviation forecasts, the Single Authoritative Source (SAS) for C&V
Important guidance tool for medical services, search and rescue, and GA
Improves NWS forecast consistency with aviation forecasts and beyond
Why digital aviation services? Why the change?
First and foremost, this moves us towards the NextGen requirements of producing digital ceiling and visibility. This national ceiling and visibility grid will be extremely useful to the AWC in producing the Area Forecast. In addition, it will provide a consistent aviation forecasts, which will lead to the SAS for ceiling and visibility grids.
These digital forecasts are used to provide important guidance to medical services, search and rescue, and general aviation. It gives guidance in areas where no C&V forecasts currently exist.
Case and Point…(example)
-April 5, 2010: Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster in Montcoal, WV
-29 deaths; long sustained incident including initial rescue then recovery, investigation, etc.
-Emergency Management told NWS Charleston they needed weather for aviation support because of the scale of incident and the helicopters. The incident was approximately 30 miles from the nearest TAF site
-NWS Charleston pointed them to the aviation grids. It was exactly what they needed!
Digital aviation services in the NWS will improve consistency among NWS forecasts with aviation and beyond. Forecasts will be coming from the same data source, thus improving consistency.

4. Who is Producing Aviation Grids
Participating NWS Forecast Offices are producing experimental digital forecasts of ceiling and visibility
Boston, MA
Jackson, KY
Caribou, ME
Charleston, WV
Greenville-Spartanburg, SC
Sterling, VA and Chicago, IL (Coming Soon)
Who is producing aviation grids?
Participating weather forecast offices are producing ceiling and visibility grids. Formatters create TAFs from these grids, and the required TAFs fall out.
Offices currently producing experimental digital forecasts include,
Boston, MA, Jackson, KY, Caribou, ME, Charleston, WV, and Greenville-Spartanburg, SC.
Additional offices will be producing these grids in the upcoming months.

5. Operations Assessment
Customers noticing a difference
Increased consistency between TAFs and other products
More frequent and proactive updates
Forecast information available for any point in forecast domain
Users can take the gridded database and create their own forecast products and displays
“We have clearly noticed improved TAF performance and improved consistency in all public forecast products in the Boston area since NWS has been producing TAFs from the ceiling and visibility grids.” - Rick Curtis, Chief Meteorologist, Southwest Airlines
How is this impacting our customers?
They are definitely noticing the change! We have gotten comments of the following…
Increased consistency between the TAFs and other WFO products (e.g. – public products)
more frequent and proactive updates, especially those sites issuing 3-hour TAFs
Aviation information is now available on a point-and-click basis
Users can take the gridded database information and create their own products to meet their needs
We received a quote from Rick Curtis of Southwest Airlines stating… “We have clearly noticed improved TAF performance and improved consistency in all public forecast products in the Boston area since NWS has been producing TAFs from the ceiling and visibility grids.” 5

6. A Change in Thinking
KBED
KBOS
What About Here???
KORH
KPVD

7. Current and Future Initiatives
Coordinate the national requirements for Enhanced Digital Services
TRACON forecasts produced from grids
Enhance verification for the future
Assess new guidance tools e.g. - Gridded LAMP, and high resolution numerical model output
AWC to produce the Area Forecast from a national C&V grid
Current and Future Initiatives:
One of the current projects Aviation Services Branch is working on is to coordinate the national requirements for Weather Forecast Offices to produce digital aviation services.
How will folks handle the C & V transitions between forecast offices? C/V grids are not “pretty” to begin with. Will people be able to understand and use this data for what it’s worth?
Meaningful verification – Offices currently producing these aviation grids have taken many steps to produce verification with the current means (verifying the non-TAF sites to their corresponding observations), but the goal is to verify these digital services as a whole grid in the future.
Forecasters will be assessing new guidance tools over all the seasons, including gridded LAMP, and high resolution numerical model output
Finally, the Aviation Weather Center will be anxiously awaiting a national C&V grid. AWC can use a national C&V grid to produce their Area Forecast.