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Airspace system demand is expected to increase as much as 300 percent by the year 2025 and the Next Generation Air
Transportation System (NextGen) is being developed to accommodate the super-density operations that this will entail.
Concomitantly, significant improvements in observations and forecasting are being undertaken to support NextGen
which will require greatly improved and more uniformly applied data for aviation weather hazards and constraints which
typically comprise storm-scale and microscale observables. Various phenomena are associated with these hazards and
constraints such as convective weather, in-flight icing, turbulence, and volcanic ash as well as more mundane aviation
parameters such as cloud tops and bases and fuel-freeze temperatures at various flight levels. Emerging problems for
aviation in space weather and the environmental impacts of aviation are also occurring at these scales. Until recently, the
threshold and objective observational requirements for these observables had not been comprehensively documented in a
single, authoritative source. Scientists at NASA and NOAA have recently completed this task and have established
baseline observational requirements for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) and expanded and
updated the NOAA Consolidated Observations Requirements List (CORL) for Aviation (CT-AWX) to better inform
National Weather Service investments for current and future observing systems. This paper describes the process and
results of this effort. These comprehensive aviation observation requirements will now be used to conduct gap analyses
for the aviation component of the Integrated Earth Observing System and to inform the investment strategies of the
FAA, NASA, and NOAA that are needed to develop the observational architecture to support NextGen and other users
of storm and microscale observations.
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