A Numerical Weather Model's Ability to Predict Characteristics of Aircraft Icing Environments

Recent advances in high-performance computing have enabled higher-resolution numerical weather models with increasingly complex data assimilation and more accurate physical parameterizations. With respect to aircraft and ground icing applications, a weather model's cloud physics scheme is responsible for the direct forecasts of the water phase and amount and is a critical ingredient to forecasting future icing conditions. In this paper, numerical model results are compared with aircraft observations taken during icing research flights, and the general characteristics of liquid water content, median volume diameter, droplet concentration, and temperature within aircraft icing environments are evaluated. The comparison reveals very promising skill by the model in predicting these characteristics consistent with observations. The application of model results to create explicit forecasts of ice accretion rates for an example case of aircraft and ground icing is shown.