Towards an improved analysis of Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts

Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAFs) are a widely accepted international form of aviation forecast used for airport and flight planning procedures at all major airports; these forecasts contain probabilistic, deterministic and temporal uncertainty terms which make verification challenging. In the present paper, each term is defined clearly within the forecast, matching the observations to the forecast as closely as the definitions allow. A novel multicategory reliability table approach is devised to measure performance; an analysis of the visibility component of each TAF is used to demonstrate that this methodology performs well compared to existing verification approaches in a variety of different test cases, chosen to illustrate scenarios that are important to forecast correctly.