Abstract:
General aviation flights operate at lower altitude with lighter aircraft weight, primarily relying on daytime visual flight. This operational mode imposes higher requirements on accuracy, refinement, and timeliness in meteorological elements forecasting compared to ordinary weather forecasts. Additionally, precise predictions of convective weather phenomena such as turbulence, convective clouds, thunderstorms are critical. Inner Mongolia Meteorological Bureau providing meteorological services for 5 general aviation airports, carries out service product research focusing on 3 key aviation meteorology domains: Airports, approach areas and flight routes. Based on the forecast service requirement, a system of aviation meteorological service products has been established, and the studies are applied to general aviation meteorological services. Forecast products and technical methods are systematically introduced, which mainly consist of airport refined elements forecasts including 1-h forecasts of wind, visibility, cloud cover, and temperature over a 72-h period, as well as estimations of visual obstacles such as precipitation and sand-dust. These are applicable to the routine terminal aerodrome forecast (TAF) for general aviation airports, runway crosswind and runway visual range (RVR) forecasts. Disastrous weather warnings for the approach area comprise several key components. Firstly, dust visibility forecasting utilizes multi-mode integration, machine learning and satellite data inversion techniques. Secondly, short-term warnings for strong convective weather are issued based on multi-source data merging, deep learning, optical flow method, and localized Radar Operational Software Engineering System. Finally, low-level wind field forecasts with a horizontal resolution of 500 m are achieved based on dynamic downscaling and intelligent downscaling technologies. A dangerous weather forecast for air routes is generated using numerical forecast statistical interpretation techniques. This forecast includes predictions for the turbulence index, icing index, and convective clouds. Products can fulfill the forecast service demand for 5 general aviation airports and 19 branch (main) airports in Inner Mongolia. Evaluation results indicate that the accuracy rates for precipitation, visibility, and wind forecasts are relatively high, and they can effectively predict changes in weather conditions. However, there are some limitations: The short-term heavy precipitation is relatively small, the wind field change forecast falls short of expectations, and the forecast ability for strong sandstorms is relatively weak. Although the convective cloud area along air routes can be predicted, there is also over-forecasting problem. Moreover, in light of the current status and deficiencies of aviation meteorological services in Inner Mongolia, the objective forecasting methods applicable to aviation meteorological services are explored.