DN 2020_04

Area Forecasts for Low Level Flights

I. Introduction

A follow up activity determined at the 6th meeting of the ICAO METP WG-MIE was to examine which of the proposed SIGWX elements in IWXXM can be adapted for use at lower levels and whether any additional feature types would be required. Mapping the features in a similar table to that given here would be a good starting point.

II. Requirement analysis

Existing coding practice

Sections 6.5 in Chapter 6 and 4 in Appendix 5 of ICAO Annex 3 describes the requirements of area forecasts which include representation in either text or chart form. [Do we have some examples on these?]

[Note: The challenge for this study is to find a representation which have adequate information for both textual and graphical rendering. This is different from the legacy IWXXM reports like METAR, TAF, etc. where they are generally equivalent to their TAC counterparts so it is almost always possible to have a backward conversion (even though they could be different from the original TAC reports).]