The Vertical Route Forecast : an Evaluation of a New Flight Path Based Weather Forecast Product with HARMONIE-AROME High Resolution Forecasts over Scandinavia

Abstract: As a complement to existing weather forecast products for aviation, a prototype of a new product is presented and evaluated. It shows the atmosphere in a vertical cross section along the intended route. This Vertical Route Forecast introduces the possibility to examine the vertical distribution of cloud layers, wind, precipitation, turbulence and more along the flight path. Through a market research with 166 participating Swedish pilots it was found that the demand for the product is high and that 90 % of the participants would use it if available. The Vertical Route Forecast is inspired by the existing product GRAMET by Ogimet (Ballester Valor, n.d) but instead of using forecasts from the weather prediction model GFS (Global Forecast System) at 0.5° (56 km) resolution it uses data from the 2.5 km resolution model HARMONIE-AROME. The latter is operational at SMHI (Swedish Meteor-ological and Hydrological Institute) and because of its high resolution it enables more detailed structures of the weather to be presented. The product differs further from GRAMET by showing only the lower parts of the atmosphere so as to be of more use to small aircraft pilots flying at low levels. To assess the accuracy of the forecasts, a model evaluation of HARMONIE-AROME has been conducted through a case study in which the model was verified and compared to GFS over Sweden. The two models were verified against their own analyses at four different atmospheric pressure levels in terms of bias, root mean square error, standard deviation and correlation. HARMONIE-AROME performed best for temperature while GFS had the best forecasts of relative humidity. Wind speed and direction were also evaluated with insignificantly better results for GFS. However, the weather did not vary very much during the study as the two weeks were dominated by high pressure systems. Other evaluations made of HARMONIE-AROME by e.g. the HIRLAM consortium (2016a) have shown good or adequate performance of the model. It was concluded that HARMONIE-AROME would be well suited as the forecast producing model for this Vertical Route Forecast.