A nowcasting model for severe weather events at airport spatial scale: the case study of Milano Malpensa

One of the challenges for meteorologists is to forecast severe weather events developing at small spatial and temporal scales. The H2020 SESAR project “Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM” (SINOPTICA) aims at improving the performances of the numerical weather prediction model to nowcast severe weather events developing in the vicinity of airports. In the project, these new prediction technologies are used to integrate weather events into an Arrival Manager (AMAN) for approach controllers to visualize the actual meteorological development and to support arrival sequencing and target time calculation. We defined the users’ requirements through a questionnaire distributed to air traffic controllers to find design solutions for additional controller support system functionalities. We are now developing a nowcasting model for air traffic controller support based on a dense network of ground-based sensors. The focus is on Milano Malpensa airport because it is located in a region with high risk of severe weather development and in which we have an easy availability of high-quality data. The results show that, for this specific case, the use of radar, lightning and Global Navigation Satellite System data greatly improve the prediction of the extremes while the weather stations alone are not essential for this purpose.