Weather Aloft

NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center

By Craig Collins

You take your seat, buckle up, listen to the cabin crew, and sit back as your flight prepares for liftoff. If you are like many of us, you leave your hopes for a smooth, enjoyable flight to the capable hands of the pilot and co-pilot and hope they can avoid turbulence and storms on your way to paradise. Airlines work very hard to avoid weather-related hazards before and during flights, and it’s a team effort to get passengers to their destinations as weather-problemfree as possible.

In 2016, the Aviation Weather Center (AWC) combined many of its weather information products and services into Graphical Forecasts for Aviation (GFA), available online at aviationweather.gov/gfa.

Many deserve credit for this: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) developed and deployed the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar network, which can help detect hazards such as wind shear (sudden shifts in wind speed or direction), precipitation, and winds and temperatures at certain altitudes (“winds aloft”). The National Center for Atmospheric Research and NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory developed better models to monitor and predict adverse weather conditions at different elevations. New generations of NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) yielded increasingly detailed images of emerging conditions that might present aviation hazards: icing, turbulence, or thunderstorms. According to a U.S. government study, weather-related aviation accidents decreased by 70 percent from 1982 through 2013.

At the center of all this activity has been the Aviation Weather Center (AWC), one of the National Weather Service’s (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction. Located in Kansas City, Missouri, the AWC provides global weather forecasts and warnings for the NWS, the FAA, industry, and aviators around the world. AWC forecasts are tailored for both commercial and private aviators operating anywhere in the continental United States and in areas that extend out from its coasts: over the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and to the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

In collaboration with international partners and commercial and private aviators, the AWC develops a worldwide database of basic weather data, such as current weather conditions; observations, watches, and warnings; wind direction and speed for multiple layers aloft; and potential aviation hazards such as icing, turbulence, thunderstorm activity, wind shear, and fog or low clouds that could obscure terrain. In 2016, after a collaborative effort to capitalize on technological improvements and new data fusion algorithms, the AWC combined many of its weather information products and services – some of which were still published as text – into Graphical Forecasts for Aviation (GFA).

This information is available at AviationWeather.gov/gfa.

A Graphical Forecast for Aviation image shows blocks of turbulent or dangerous airspace shaded in red, such as tropical storms (TS).

GFA provides all data critical for aviation safety in a digital graphical format: a map that users can scale and customize as needed, providing a three-dimensional forecast divided into horizontal and vertical segments. In 2019, GFA coverage expanded to include the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and an expansion over the entire Pacific Ocean became operational on July 30, 2020.

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The AWC offers several complementary tools to help aviators visualize and integrate this information: The Flight Path Tool, for example, is a comprehensive geographic display that runs as a desktop application, overlaying multiple fields of interest and allowing users to slice threedimensional data horizontally and vertically along a flight path. The tool offers an animated look at how conditions may change over the course of a flight. The Helicopter Emergency Medical Services tool is designed specifically to show weather conditions for shortdistance and low-altitude flights common to the emergency medical services.

At the Center’s Aviation Weather Testbed, a collaborative team of developers continues to refine, streamline, and update these tools – validating new and better models, implementing data, and improving not only forecasting methods but also data visualization techniques that can communicate its multi-layered aviation weather data as simply and effectively as possible. As commercial aviation continues to grow (4.5 billion people took to the skies in 2019, nearly double the number of passengers a decade earlier), AWC and its partners work to further decrease weather-related aviation hazards – to ensure that more so than ever, the most dangerous part of any flight is the drive to the airport.