A numerical weather model's ability to predict aircraft and ground icing environments

Recent advances in high-performance computing has enabled higher resolution numerical weather models with increasingly complex data assimilation and more accurate physical parameterizations. With respect to aircraft and ground icing applications, a weather model's cloud physics scheme is responsible for the direct forecasts of water phase and amount and is a critical ingredient to forecasting future icing conditions. In this paper, we compare numerical model results to aircraft observations taken during icing research flights and evaluate the general characteristics of liquid water content, median volume diameter, droplet concentration, and temperature within aircraft icing environments. The comparison reveals very promising skill by the model to predict these characteristics consistent with observations. The application of model results to create explicit forecasts of ice accretion rates with example cases of aircraft and ground icing are shown.