A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/785247
This product will have a 4, 6, and 8 - hour panel just like the old CCFP but inste ad of a forecaster starting from scratch there will be an automated version that will then go through the collaboration process with the a viation weather community. Once this has happened , the product will be disseminated 45 minutes prior to the Strategic P lanning call. This will allow the Command Center and TMUs to see it and decide what impacts the forecast will have on the upcoming plan. The goal is to eventually extend the forecast out to 24 hours to allow for next day planning. N extGen Weather Process or (NWP) and Common Support Services - Weather (CSS_WX) Both programs are moving forward the Technical Center hardware for CSS - WX should be installed this summer and testing on data feeds and weather products. The Aviation Weather Display development is ong oing and one of the issues being worked on is the login requirements and passwords. Security wants the same type of login/password requirements that administrative systems use and I keep emphasizing that this is an operational system and we don't log in an d out of ERAM or STARS. Raytheon has a planned demo for the human factors working group the end of March to show the results of build 1 of 4. There are a lot of products that have to be incorporated into the AWD and training discussions on these products i s just getting under way with a meeting scheduled at Raytheon in March. Human Weather Observers (HWO, LAWRS) The agency has started to conduct quality assurance reviews of both CWO and LAWRS sites. A number of issues has come up, one of the biggest items is logging in to and out of the ASOS terminals in the towers when a tower closes. This impacts how a METAR is coded when it is transmitted from being an augmented to a completely automated report. Another issue is lack of refresher training for actually c onducting the weather observation; as of now the only refresher that controllers are taking is how to use the ASOS terminal. A new effort will be getting under way on a recurrent type training for LAWRS observers to improve the quality of the weather obser vation's that are being conducted. The National Weather Service (NWS) used to conduct the evaluations and the FAA took over the responsibility for these in November 2015, the QCG group will be adding some of the evaluations to the quality control checklist s for the inspectors to look at when they conduct external facility evaluations. The mov e to shift more towers from CWO s to LAWRS is on hold, as the agency has to report out to congress, how the SRM process was conducted and the results of the safety cas es for each site. One of the issues that was a large concern was the inability for controllers to leave the tower to take an observation, this was especially concerning with the requirement to delineate the difference between i ce p ellets and other freezing precipitation due to the direct impact on deicing requirements that have been levied by flight standards. Testing has been completed on a sensor that has the ability to discriminate between the types of freezing precipitation but the report has not been f inalized. American Meteorological Society (AMS) Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology (ARAM) The annual ARAM meeting was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of AMS. The meeting consisted of four days of presentations from meteorologists, s cientists, and academia on a range of aviation weather related topics. A great number of discussions