Service Name

Name to be used to refer to the service.

High Resolution Pan-European Icing Forecasts

Service Abstract

High level description of the purpose of the service.

The harmonised weather hazard service for icing provides a new harmonised view of icing to enable users to identify areas of light, moderate or severe in-flight icing over the European domain.

Common Service Definition

When the service has been identified as requiring a common definition to ensure harmonized implementation, this should be stated in this section, including a reference to this definition if already exists, or a reference to the group that is working on its definition. Normally all services that are expected to be provided by multiple organizations will benefit from a common definition.

There is no service definition, as the service is only published by DWD. A definition may be designed in the future.

Service Implementation Status

If it is known already when the service is expected to be implemented by the different providers this should be mentioned.

When the service it is already implemented by some providers, a reference to the SWIM Registry should be included if available.

The service description is published on the SWIM Registry and is operationally available. There are two instances of the service, one from Met Office and one from DWD. Although the services are slightly different, the content of the icing forecast information is identical from both providers.

Service Information

Overview of information that is to be provided by the service. When it relates to existing information products, these should be referenced, and the relationship should be described (e.g. partial or complete coverage).

The service merges high resolution NWP data from the MET Providers of Germany, France and the UK, to create a harmonised representation of in-flight icing across the European domain. It improves any single model icing data by blending high resolution input data from multiple models using a complex linear weighting methodology. This blended data output is then converted to severity levels (0=nil, 1=light, 2=moderate, 3=severe) to enable quick identification of hazardous areas of icing by users.

The data is primarily available in gridded format (GRIB2) covering the full pan-European spatial area provided as METGriddedForecastService. Work is ongoing to complete a polygon features service that will also make the data available in vector format (GeoJSON).

The icing 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 hourly timesteps and updates every 6 hours. It covers the area between 29.5°N to 70.5°N, 23.5 °W to 62.5°E.

Service Provision

Service Provider Organization

List of organizations or stakeholder types (MET Provider) that are expected to provide this service. It should be stated both the CP1 expectations as well as what is expected beyond CP1. A clear distinction should be made between what is expected from the regulation and what is not, including whether this service is mandatory, recommended or optional from a regulatory perspective.

The service is generated by and published by DWD (the German MET service provider).

Data Origination

List of organizations or stakeholder types that are expected to provide information to enable the provision of this service. When the provider of the service is the same as the provider of the information, this information is redundant with the previous section.

The information service is generated from high resolution icing NWP model output from the UK, France and Germany. The harmonisation is done by DWD and the service is published by DWD.

Provision Architecture

Description of the information distribution architecture (from data originator to service provider to service consumer) specially when it is considered a consolidated access to information (i.e. the consumer does not need to interact with all data originators but can obtain all information via a consolidated access point).

The icing forecast data is taken from each of the participating national MET Service Providers and blended using a tailored weighting technique to ensure the harmonised output gives an optimal solution. The forecasts are based on either Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) output or nowcasting methods, but the most suitable scientific approach is applied to the consolidation procedure. The harmonisation is model inputs is undertaken by DWD and the service is published by DWD on behalf of all contributors.

Service Consumption

Service Consumer Organization

List of organizations or stakeholder types (MET Provider) that are expected to consume this service. It should be stated both the CP1 expectations as well as what is expected beyond CP1. A clear distinction should be made between what is expected from the regulation and what is not, including whether this service is mandatory, recommended, or optional from a regulatory perspective.

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

• Air traffic control users

• Airspace users

• Designated MET Watch Offices

Consumer Usage

Description of what the service consumer is expected to do operationally with the information consumed from the service. This can be considered as the use cases for the service.

The resulting forecasts provide a harmonised, single view of hazardous in-flight icing across Europe, serving as a common reference for greater consistency and improved situational awareness which should support more consistent decision-making within the aviation community. Specifically:

• Air traffic control users

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

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

• Airspace users and flight planning functions

  • Flight planning – both briefing for awareness of hazardous conditions and potential trajectory considerations for flight plans.

  • Possible in flight updates of hazardous conditions, particularly for long-haul operators, where icing forecasts may evolve through the duration of the flight, necessitating revisions or updates to flight plans.

• Designated MET Watch Offices

As input to the issuance and coordination of SIGMET issuance.