Enhancing collaboration between AWC and Core partners

There is a growing emphasis on improved collaboration and communication regarding anticipated aviation hazards to ensure a uniform aviation forecast across the National Weather Service (NWS). Participants at the AWT Spring Experiment are navigating what this collaboration may look like as a new forecast desk, National Aviation Operations Center (NAOC), within the operations at AWC.

Throughout the week, participants are simulating some of the tasks that may be done by an AWC lead forecaster at the NAOC desk and providing feedback based on the utility of the collaboration for their own operations. One major task for the forecasters is to develop and conduct a mock national collaboration call targeted for internal NWS aviation forecasters to ensure we are drawing the same picture regarding weather impacts to the NAS. Utilizing a new “briefing tool” on the testbed website, our participants collected the information they thought would be most useful for our CWSU partners and presented a mock call. Participants discussed the timing of these calls and how they might affect our partners differently from mornings on the east coast in the swing of things to the west coast still waking up.

AWC lead forecaster Joey Welsh working on creating a collaboration call briefing package

Participants are also exploring how AWC might create a decision support graphic depicting the “Key Aviation Message” of the day. This graphic is aimed towards providing general aviation pilots a targeted picture of major impacts within the NAS. While exploring different tools to create a graphic, the participants spent time honing in on what they considered the most major impact and how to relay this information to the GA community.

Communicating Impact

An important part of producing a forecast for the public is communicating the impacts that the weather will have.  As part of the HPC afternoon transportation briefing, the impact graphics produced by HPC and AWC forecasters is critiqued by human factors researchers.  They provide feedback on how well the graphics communicated impacts important to emergency managers and air traffic decision makers.

One of the pieces of feedback offered by these communication experts on yesterday's graphic was that when multiple regions of Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) were depicted, it was somewhat difficult to tell which side of the red line was supposed to be IFR.  This was especially the case when these regions were close to each other.  The first image below is the original briefing graphic, where the "IFR" label was placed on the side of the red contours where IFR was expected.  Adding a shading to the appropriate side of the contour reduced confusion and provides higher "glance value" and communicated this information more quickly.

Original briefing graphic.

Updated briefing graphic with shading indicating regions where IFR was forecast.