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7.2 Airport Characteristics

airport pictureAs a new NWS forecaster who may have never issued an aviation forecast before, there are some airport characteristics and geography you need to be familiar with before preparing your first aviation forecasts. These include geographical features (mountains, oceans, lakes, etc.,) or micrometeorology influences (vegetation, soil type, etc.,) that may impact local weather conditions.

Your Aviation Focal Point or forecasters in your office should be able to answer the following questions:

Local Climatology

Review of local climate studies for your TAF sites (if available) will help identify mean and extreme values of wind, ceiling, visibility and precipitation-types. The frequencies of occurrence for significant ceilings, visibilities, wind, thunderstorms, and other precipitation types can be useful information.

Let's look at a couple of examples:

Consider a cloud ceiling of 500 feet and visibilities less than 2 miles.

  • How often has one or both of these conditions occurred at your TAF sites over a 30 year period of record?
  • How often have thunderstorms with wind speeds greater than or equal to 50 kts been observed at one of your TAF sites?

The point here is if these events rarely occur, then you probably would not include them in your TAF unless you have very high confidence level that they are going to occur.

The Aviation Forecast Preparation System (AvnFPS) application used to prepare, monitor, and disseminate your aviation forecast has the ability to use climate databases created from many of the airport observation locations. The climatology tools in AvnFPS can create ceiling and visibility distributions and wind rose displays from the climatology data to help pick out these rare occurrences of weather elements at your TAF sites.