Always take the weather with you: Migrating the Met Office Space Weather programme
Identifying potential weather hazards is crucial for flying safety – from turbulence, cloud cover and severe icing to volcanic activity, cyclones and nuclear events.
As the aviation industry rapidly evolves new and improved data sets will contribute towards limiting the environmental impact of air travel, coping with increased traffic and capacity demands and helping air traffic management strategies to improve flight safety by avoiding hazardous weather conditions – ultimately decreasing the risk of disasters and protecting lives.
Utilising Meteorological Insights for Aviation Safety
People around the world look to the Met Office for weather and climate-related data. With its commitment to accuracy and innovation, the Met Office utilises advanced technology and scientific research to assist governmental decision-making and issue weather warnings to the public.
Access to accurate meteorological forecasts is crucial in the aviation industry. Weather hazards such as turbulence, icing, convective storms, volcanic activity, cyclones and nuclear events all have a significant impact on the comfort, timing and ultimate safety of a flight.
Modernising Aviation Forecasting: Automating for Enhanced Safety and Efficiency
In the early 1980s, requirements were developed for the World Area Forecast System (WAFS) to include the forecasting of upper air winds, temperatures and significant weather hazards. The result was the WAFS Significant Weather (SIGWX) charts; used to assess the weather conditions impacting flight plans, identifying the location of the jet stream and areas of potentially hazardous weather that could pose risk.
As of 2024, the Met Office WAFS forecasts are still a manual process, involving a team of meteorologists laboriously extracting data from the Met Office supercomputer and producing charts by hand every six hours. As well as this process taking up valuable meteorologist time, the Met Office was struggling to maintain this bank of experts.
Another issue the Met Office had was that the current system was restricted to producing 24-hour forecasts. This top-line view no longer met the needs of the aviation industry, particularly for short-haul and ultra-long-haul flight planning.
The Met Office needed to automate this decades-old process to ensure weather-related data is delivered to the right people, in the right format, at the right time to increase the safety and carbon efficiency of flight planning, as well as improve the customer experience.
BJSS and Met Office Collaborate in Transforming Aviation Forecasting
In 2022 the Met Office challenged BJSS to help futureproof and transform the legacy forecasting process and manual forecast creation to enhance the delivery of crucial information to the aviation industry.
BJSS worked collaboratively with Met Office in a hybrid model partnership, to automate the production of forecasts for reporting aviation weather information, increasing the accessibility of global weather data and ensuring safer flying conditions across the world.
Check out how BJSS and the Met Office delivered the new SIGWX system in just 12 months: https://www.bjss.com/our-work/met-office-futureproofing-significant-weather-forecasts
Heather Cover-Kus
Heather is Head of Central Government Programme at techUK, working to represent the supplier community of tech products and services to Central Government.
Ellie Huckle
Ellie joined techUK in March 2018 as a Programme Assistant to the Public Sector team and now works as a Programme Manager for the Central Government Programme.
Annie Collings
Annie joined techUK as the Programme Manager for Cyber Security and Central Government in September 2023.
Austin Earl
Austin joined techUK’s Central Government team in March 2024 to launch a workstream within education and edtech.
Ella Gago-Brookes
Ella joined techUK in November 2023 as a Markets Team Assistant, supporting the Justice and Emergency Services, Central Government and Financial Services Programmes.
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