Introduction
Weather, especially Mesoscale Convective Storms (MCSs), exerts a disruptive influence on aviation, both in the terminal area and en-route air traffic flow. It is important to understand how well high-resolution Numerical Weather Prediction models are able to predict the location and timing of these large aviation impacting storms. This object based approach assess the performance of the NOAA/NCEP High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) in realtime to give forecasters a sense of recent performance of the model to aid in interpreting current forecast model runs.
Storms are identified using the technique described by Pinto et al. (2015). The TITAN software is used to identify storms with a maximum dimension exceeding 100 km. A threshold of 3.5 kg m-2 is used to identify storms. Small gaps of up to 15 km are allowed between areas of VIL exceeding 3.5 kg m-2. Finally, the candidate area of convection must persist for at least one hour in order to be classified as an MCS.
Acknowledgement
This work has been supported by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on these websites are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.
