18-006-AF Delete Weather Area Types

[joebayles]

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM: The U.S. Air Force requests removal of 11 weather-specific area types that can be represented by an area outline and label without specific outline line type and colors. Currently, these areas are only produced through 30-hours and are an over-restrictive implementation of products produced by World Area Forecast Centres (WAFCs) under World Meteorological Organization and International Civil Aviation Organization regulations. Full implementation is manually intensive with currently fielded system tools requiring additional resourcing to implement.

PROPOSED SOLUTION: Removal of 11 area types: Codes 170100 through 170900. Use generic weather area representation 171000. 171000 should contain a note "with appropriate label(s) and/or weather symbols." This implementation is consistent with products produced by respective WAFC for civil use and airspace.

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS: Implementation be delayed until automated tools are fielded. The U.S. Air Force believes it is the only service producing these products/representations in this format.

IMPACT ON RELATED DOCUMENTS: These area type codes are not depicted in Allied Procedural Publication-6 (APP-6C). APP-6C is consistent with World Meteorological Organization (WMO) standard symbols and Joint Staff has agreed to implement APP-6C in its entirety. Therefore, we want to revise MIL-STD-2525 to be horizontally consistent with WMO regulations and APP-6.

REFERENCES: MIL-STD-2525; APP-6C, WMO-No 485, Manual on Global Data-processing and Forecast System, Volume 1 (Annex IV to WMO Technical Regulations).

[joebayles]

Deferred for USAF to rewrite based on feedback from the committee.

[joebayles]

Withdrawn by the USAF at 18-2.