Service Name

High Resolution Pan-European Turbulence Forecasts

Service Abstract

High Resolution Pan-European Turbulence Forecast service provides a new harmonised view of turbulence to enable users to identify areas of light, moderate or severe turbulence over the European domain.

Common Service Definition

The High Resolution Pan-European Turbulence Forecast Service delivers a blend of turbulence data from the Met Office, Météo-France and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) to produce a harmonised, pan-European view of forecast turbulence, with the additional option of a polygon features service marking regions of low, moderate and severe intensity levels.  

There is no service definition for the High Resolution Pan-European Turbulence Forecast Information Service, however the contributing and publishing organisations, may develop one in the future. Instead, the service description is published on the SWIM registry by the UK’s Met Office.

Service Implementation Status

The service description is published on the SWIM Registry by the Met Office.

Service Information

The turbulence forecast product has a horizontal resolution of 0.0625°x0.0625 and is produced for the following 9 pressure levels (hPa); 400, 350, 300, 275, 250, 225, 200, 175, 150. The product runs out to T+36 in 28 timesteps (hourly timesteps to T+24, then 3-hourly thereafter) and updates every 6 hours. It covers the area between 29.5°N to 70.5°N, 23.5 °W to 62.5°E.

The data is primarily available in gridded format (GRIB2) covering the full pan-European spatial area. The Met Office are also offering a choice of pre-defined subsets for the harmonised turbulence gridded dataset based on the Functional Airspace Blocks within the domain. In addition, a polygons features service is also available in vector format (GEOjson). This service exports the harmonised turbulence data as a series of geometric polygons or 2-dimensional features that are used to represent the areas of different turbulence severity levels, with polygons marking regions of low, moderate and severe intensity.

Data Origination

These datasets are currently available on request from the Met Office.

Provision Architecture

The turbulence data is provided within the scope of the IP68 European Harmonised Forecasts of Adverse Weather.  The information service is generated from high resolution turbulence NWP model output from the UK, France and Germany. The harmonisation is done by the Met Office and the SWIM service is published by the Met Office on behalf of all contributors.

Service Consumption

Service Consumer Organization and Usage

The following organisations are expected to realise operational benefits from using these High Resolution Pan-European Turbulence Forecasts:

• Air traffic control users

  • Anticipating sectors which airspace users may wish to avoid due to expected hazardous turbulence conditions

  • Anticipating higher controller workload from reroute requests, and pilot reports.

• Airspace users

• a) pre-flight planning by operators;

• b) in-flight replanning by operators using centralized operational control of flight operations;

• c) use by flight crew members before departure; and

• d) aircraft in flight.

• Designated MET Watch Offices

  • As input to the issuance and coordination of SIGMET.