Weather

The weather affects our lives every day in a variety of fashions, from agriculture and transportation to industry. Freezing temperatures can damage citrus crops in Florida or Spain, causing a rise in the price of oranges at the grocery store. Winter snows often create hazardous driving conditions. Thick fog may slow traffic on the roads and cause delays at airports. Severe weather, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, and blizzards, can damage property and take lives. NASA and the Applied Sciences Program collaborate with partner organizations to enable and enhance the application of NASA's Earth System science research results to serve national weather-related policy and management decision support tools.

Because of weather's importance, meteorologists have developed ways to forecast and mitigate weather conditions. The Applied Sciences Program efforts in weather focus on the infusion of quality science observations from NASA Earth science satellite missions and predictions from Earth system science models into Aviation Decision Support Systems (DSS) managed by partner agencies and organizations.

The weather application area enables Earth science applications to support weather-affected economic interests. The application is particularly focused on applications to support the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). As appropriate, the application may expand to support other specific weather-effected economic interests to improve the global mobility of people and material.

Impacts of weather upon aviation can be substantially mitigated using existing spacecraft weather information. At present, only a small percentage of the available spacecraft observations are used in operational weather forecasting. NASA and its partners are working to bridge the gap between research results and operational solutions that assimilate information obtained by Earth observation satellites. NASA and its partners are working to make sure that information available from instruments on current and future spacecraft research missions are verified and validated for infusion into operational forecasting techniques in a more timely fashion. To this end, the Aviation program element partners with the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate as well as several Federal organizations, including the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology (OFCM), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

For project information visit:
http://science.larc.nasa.gov/asap/index.html