Originally Posted by HEATHROW DIRECTOR
Wow 30W.. you appear to have considerably more confidence in the weather forecasters than I do after a lifetime in aviation. Ring any two forecasters and get a different story. I planned to visit Farnborough today with family and friends and checked every available forecast... but early today we abandoned the visit based on three out of four forecasts of rain and thunderstorms. As I write (midday), the BBC is now saying "sunny intervals" whilst uk.weather.com is going for a 50% chance of precip and thunderstorms. Metcheck.com covers itself with "intermittent rain"!
I well remember trying to get a surface wind forecast whilst trying to decide whether to change runways at Heathrow - one forecaster promised a predominantly SW wind and 10 mins later another said it would be mainly SE!
UK ATC does it's very best in the circumstances and appropriate action is taken in severe weather but I suggest that there is a very long way to go before day-to-day planning becomes based on weather forecasts. Just imagine if flow control was introduced based on the forecasts for today.
We have forecasters at all of our centers today and they put out pretty good and accurate forecasts. They also have some pretty awesome tools at hand. Being that we are more concerned about what is going to happen in the next two to four hours, they get this pretty well. As for telling us what is going to happen tomorrow, they are close but not always accurate. We base our flows by what the Center weather folks tell us, and it does indeed help try to move things in a smarter way, (well when central flow doesn't just bung it all up.) we are also doing it much more for sector flows due to weather.
In a fit of "we have to run like a business and save money." the FAA is looking at cosolidating the weather function to just a few sites and then plan on telecoferenceing to figure out what is going on. Not a good idea at ALL!
regards