Development of FAA national ceiling and visibility products: Challenges, strategies and progress

This paper outlines the data sources and methods used within the automated ConUS analysis and forecasting systems currently under development within the FAA's National Ceiling and Visibility development team. Encouraging results are obtained in work toward use of KDD methods for estimation of ceiling height in gap areas within the real-time analysis system and in the use of a new forecast selection scheme to guide synthesis of the forecast product from 2 to 10 h using a variety of operational guidance products as input. These and other techniques are used to improve the performance of the analysis and forecast systems, which are targeted toward production of improved automated forecast input grids and forecaster guidance for operational use. Additional results will be available at the time of the conference.