About the Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section

Missy Petty, Chief

NOAA and the FAA are responsible for improving services to society. These services include effectively managing and safely maneuvering airplanes around severe convective weather while en route to a destination or landing at an airport. These services rely on highly accurate weather information at critical decision points.

In support of this responsibility, the Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section of the Global Systems Division of ESRL is leading an effort to provide technologies that are used to assess weather information at critical decision points that effect society.

Four main research themes form the pillars of the Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section:

  • State-of-the-art forecast evaluation and verification concepts and technologies and tools, that are integrated into NWS and FAA operations
  • Consumer-specific evaluation research to bridge between the forecast provider and the forecast consumer at critical decision points.
  • Independent forecast assessment evaluations
  • Technology transfer to operations

Programs

FAA Aviation Weather Office programs; Aviation Weather Research Program, Reduce Weather Impact Program, and NextGen Net-Enabled Weather Program: The Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section plays a prominent role within the FAA Aviation Weather Research Program by leading and executing the activities of the FAA/AWRP Quality Assessment Product Development Team. The QA PDT is responsible for building a solid scientific foundation for assessing weather forecast quality with respect to critical aviation weather decisions by exploiting the use of high resolution observation datasets and integrating FAA business rules, and safety and planning criteria into the assessment process, 2) building a network-enabled verification service (NEVS) that will provide the engineering infrastructure that is needed for quality assessment information to be disseminated to the NextGen Enterprise Architecture, and 3) providing independent assessments of aviation weather forecasts products that are transitioning from an experimental test environment to NWS or FAA aviation operations through the FAA NextGen Weather Evaluation Capability (NWEC). Our publications are available to users at http://esrl.noaa.gov/fiqas/publications.html

Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen): The Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section is working with the FAA Aviation Weather Office, the FAA WJH Technical Center, and the NOAA National Weather Service to develop and deploy NEVS technology and its verification concepts for integration into the NextGen Enterprise Architecture. Planned deployments are scheduled for 2013 (NextGen Initial Operating Capability) and 2016 (NextGen Mid-term Operating Capability). Figures 1 and 2 show the progression of the NEVS technology at these specific NextGen milestones.

Figure 1
Figure 1. By 2013, NEVS will be providing verification information directly to the 4-D Weather Cube using NextGen Network Enabled Weather (NNEW) technology for access to and from the cube.

Figure 2
Figure 2. By 2016, using NNEW data standards and data transition protocols, NEVS will be providing sophisticated verification information (in the context of FAA operations) to support the generation of the NextGen Single Authoritative Source (SAS) and additional verification information to the 4-D Weather Cube.

Contact Us
Phone: 303-497-6514
Fax: 303-497-6301
Email:
Section Acting Chief:
Melissa.A.Petty@noaa.gov
Website:
esrl.noaa.gov/fiqas/
Mailing Address:
325 Broadway R/GSD5
Boulder, CO 80305
People
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Staff