NASA Langley Research Center’s Advanced Satellite Aviation-weather Products (ASAP) is the core project of the NASA Earth Science Division, Applied Sciences Program, Weather Program Element. ASAP was established in 2002 as a partnership between NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the NOAA National Weather Service’s Aviation Services Branch and the broader aviation weather community.
This partnership entails the development or improvement of aviation weather products and information through the infusion of satellite data applications. It involves the cooperative efforts of researchers at the NASA Langley Research Center, the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) and the University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) with FAA Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP) Product Development Teams (PDTs) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Research Applications Laboratory (RAL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, NOAA Earth Science Research Laboratory and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Monterey. As of 2003, the focus of these efforts has increasingly been aligned with the efforts of the interagency Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) to develop the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).

For the first four months of 2007, the Department of Transportation reported U.S. airline flights arrived late more often than any other year since the government began tracking on-time performance 13 years ago. About 40 percent of those delays were found to be weather-related. The products developed by ASAP are being integrated into aviation weather operations by the FAA and NOAA and will eventually be used by the NextGen Network-Enabled Weather (NNEW) System to enable pilots, dispatchers and controllers to manage and mitigate the effects of weather hazards and constraints.

The ASAP science team has developed cutting-edge applications to improve weather nowcast and forecast products for convective weather, volcanic ash clouds, in-flight icing and turbulence and has recently expanded its scope to tackle new challenges in space weather and on the impacts of aviation on climate and air quality. ASAP research employs satellite technology using instruments on NASA and NOAA geostationary, polar-orbiting and Lagrange point satellites. These primarily have included GOES, AQUA, TERRA, NOAA, AURA and, ACE. Applications for the NASA MODIS, AIRS and OMI instruments, the NOAA GOES imager and sounder and the NOAA AVHRR instrument have been developed. The work completed by ASAP is also preparing the way for the development of applications for the next generation of weather data from high-resolution, hyperspectral polar orbiting and geostationary satellites.

ASAP recognition and awards include a significant body of peer-reviewed and conference publications related to the project. The ASAP manager and the project’s primary investigators received a prestigious NASA Honor Award from the NASA Administrator in 2006. In 2007, ASAP was selected to receive the prestigious Holloway Technology Transfer Award from the NASA Langley Research Center. The October 2007 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) features an in-depth overview of the ASAP Project as the featured cover article of the journal.

In response to a 2008 mandate in the NASA authorization bill NASA and NOAA are now moving forward to conduct joint, consolidated annual aviation weather research planning in conjunction with our FAA partners.