How

The Project is to demonstrate the concepts of research-to-operations and science-for-services with the full value chain through collaboration between Research Board, INFCOM and SERCOM. It would involve, for example, airport city-pairs to demonstrate the gate-to-gate use of advanced aviation meteorological information in the future aviation operations environment. It would require seamless meteorological information from ground-based operations, take-off, ascent, cruising, descent, until landing phase to support the safe and efficient flight operations for the whole trajectory. The Project fits well with WMO’s seamless earth system initiative, where “seamless” refers not just to the time-scales from minutes to days in this project, but across earth system domains spanning the whole value chain from observations to users’ benefits. Opportunity would be taken to evaluate the impact of observations, including the benefits of additional observations for the purpose of verification.

While weather hazard information from the World Area Forecast System (WAFS) is available for flight planning, this has to be supplemented by advanced nowcasting information for inflight (tactical) and pre-flight (pre-tactical) decisions. The project will study the blending of nowcasting information on the above-mentioned key meteorological hazards with global and regional models using advanced techniques such as the use of Machine Learning methodology.

Special attention will be placed on the advancement of the use of ensemble techniques in probabilistic forecasting and statistical methods for assessing the uncertainty/ reliability of the information, as well as on verification and validation. There is also a need to link with the Seamless-Global Data Processing and Forecasting System (S-GDPFS) concerning data availability and future modelling improvements. Close connection with the aviation users via, e.g., SC-AVI under SERCOM, would be required to ensure the outcomes are fit-for-purpose.