WHITE – Winter hazards in terminal environment: An automated nowcasting system for Munich Airport

Abstract

Winter weather is a decisive factor affecting the daily course of action at airports and causing delays or even safety hazards. Snow covered or iced aerodrome movement areas or aircraft require an initiation of counteractions on time. In order to minimize economic loss and to maintain safety, winter weather situations within an investigation area around an airport have to be detected and forecasted as precisely as possible. At the Department of Transport Meteorology of the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Atmospheric Physics the winter weather nowcasting system WHITE (Winter Hazards In Terminal Environment) has been developed kindly supported by Munich Airport operations. Designed as an automated system WHITE assimilates multiple real-time data sources and assesses problematic winter weather aspects like the differentiation between snow and liquid precipitation, the identification of freezing precipitation and icing plus the rating of surface conditions. The innovative approach of WHITE, combining critical parameters for different predefined winter weather scenarios by means of Fuzzy Logic, classifying hazardous regions and generating winter weather objects, enables the determination of precipitation type and hazard’s intensity.