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Navy Weather Woes

C420sailor

Former Rhino Bro
pilot
I don't understand why we have to go through the ass pain of submitting a report if nothing unsafe happened during the flight. It's a complete waste of time. If something unsafe happens, I'll submit an ASAP report.
 

scoolbubba

Brett327 gargles ballsacks
pilot
Contributor
I don't understand why we have to go through the ass pain of submitting a report if nothing unsafe happened during the flight. It's a complete waste of time. If something unsafe happens, I'll submit an ASAP report.

You're not thinking about this militarily. Someone wouldn't be able to put some ridiculous metric in their fitrep like "implemented and maintained a cutting edge safety incident reporting system which confirms a 99.7% safe in-flight environment."
 

helolumpy

Apprentice School Principal
pilot
Contributor
You're not thinking about this militarily. Someone wouldn't be able to put some ridiculous metric in their fitrep like "implemented and maintained a cutting edge safety incident reporting system which confirms a 99.7% safe in-flight environment."

Or a civilian at the Safety Center who is responsible for creating and maintaining programs such as these...
 

KBayDog

Well-Known Member
I don't understand why we have to go through the ass pain of submitting a report if nothing unsafe happened during the flight. It's a complete waste of time. If something unsafe happens, I'll submit an ASAP report.

I agreed with you when I first learned about this program, as I've always been a proponent of reporting by exception. (I hated the hourly "All Conditions Normal" reports on the boat when I was on IWO. Hey Shipmate, haven't you heard of The Boy Who Cried Wolf? Call me if something is not normal!!)

However, I can see the utility in mandatory ASAP reporting after every flight. Perhaps it builds habit patterns, but if nothing else, if you're forced to spend 5 minutes trying to log onto NMCI to complete a 2-second report, you might figure that since you've already wasted so much time you might as well report something.

Is ASAP a replacement for the normal procedures (HAZREPs, Anymouse, etc.)? Hell no. However, like Squorch has pointed out, it has provided the opportunity to discover trends that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. We're fortunate in the TRACOM in that we have an incredible number of sorties every day, so we can spot trends very quickly. Again, this is important when you don't own your maintenance department, but it's also a good tool for validating your procedures.

Is a fleet squadron with maybe a dozen aircraft going to see the trends as quickly as a those of us with a few hundred orange-and-white aircraft on the line? Of course not. However, trends that are community- or Navy-wide might get caught this way.

Who knows? Maybe ASAP goes away some day (though I doubt it...) Until then, it's yet another tool for communication, and, specifically referring to Squorch's example, we have already seen its benefits in the HTs.
 

picklesuit

Dirty Hinge
pilot
Contributor
I can never figure out why Navy weather guessers are always convinced the fucking sky is falling...

It’s to the point I don’t even trust what they say and generally find the nearest civilian field for an accurate forecast.

The two attached are just an example...30G60...are you fucking kidding me???
 

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Brett327

Well-Known Member
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
I would be surprised if the AGs are writing the TAF. That is mostly NWS data. It strikes me that 30G60 wouldn’t be that unusual in a moderately strong thunderstorm, no?
 

Gatordev

Well-Known Member
pilot
Site Admin
Contributor
I would be surprised if the AGs are writing the TAF. That is mostly NWS data. It strikes me that 30G60 wouldn’t be that unusual in a moderately strong thunderstorm, no?

Somebody in Norfolk writes the TAF and it's ridiculous. It's been ridiculous since they went to the central weather briefing centers in ~2006-ish. At one point at Whiting, Norfolk called the FDO to tell us we were in a Convective SIGMET and the fax was coming shortly. So started the weather recall/abort calls on the radio. A few minutes later, the fax came through and it showed "Whiting" to be located in Alabama, some 40 miles away from the actual location. Turns out we weren't in the SIGMET.

Yes, I know that's different than the TAF, but the .mil TAFs are not from NWS. You'll have two fields right next to each other and the military TAF will spell disaster while the NWS one will show some moderate weather might be around at some point.

I'm actually surprised this is a new thing for you, @picklesuit. When I was at Whiting, the gouge we always went by was look at what NSE said, then look at what PNS said and plan to roll with that (barring any fog, which was always the wild card). It's advice I still follow today in Jax.
 

Brett327

Well-Known Member
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
Interesting. Where do local AGs have the opportunity to interpret raw data and write a TAF? With the centralization of Navy Wx services, I imagine there are very few stations where AGs make local observations. Whenever I’ve been on the road getting the Wx brief from a Navy or USAF base ops, I’ve watched them cut/paste TAF/METAR data directly from the NWS site into the -1. These days, we mostly just use the aero weather app, which is awesome, then get the -1 for the 3710 check in the box.
 

Uncle Fester

Robot Pimp
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
Interesting. Where do local AGs have the opportunity to interpret raw data and write a TAF? With the centralization of Navy Wx services, I imagine there are very few stations where AGs make local observations. Whenever I’ve been on the road getting the Wx brief from a Navy or USAF base ops, I’ve watched them cut/paste TAF/METAR data directly from the NWS site into the -1. These days, we mostly just use the aero weather app, which is awesome, then get the -1 for the 3710 check in the box.

AFAIK, Pax is the only NAS/MCAS that has its own AGs and local wx office, due to the HX-21 incident a few years back.
 

Jim123

DD-214 in hand and I'm gonna party like it's 1998
pilot
Just spitballing here, but I suspect NFWB, being in a supporting role, got the short end of the budget stick:

- they were probably not good at writing "impact statements," on the loss of local forecasters, to people outside the community
- somebody, either within or outside of the weather community, had some misguided faith in the yet-immature technology to let a computer program do it all for you

The impact is that their computerized centralized TAFs are often useless when the rubber meets the road- that is when the weather will be close to legal mins. Sometimes the computer nails it, but often a forecaster with local knowledge would make the difference.

A couple more oddities in their computer model, one is it very readily forecasts hail. I think that is an artifact of the freak hailstorm in 2005 that downed nearly all of the TW-5 fleet. By definition, freak hailstorms can't be forecast, but if you forecast +TSRAGS several times each year then eventually a blind squirrel will find a hailstone. Another one is the wind speed when thunderstorms are forecast, sometimes hilariously exaggerated. Take the nearby civilian airport TAF and add 50% to the base and gusts. So 20G30 on the civvy TAF is usually 30G45 on the NFWB, 30G40 civilian is usually 45G60 a few miles away at the military aerodrome. And if there is a "chance" of tornados then the NFWB TAF will have something like __G75 (and you just have to interpret that as tornado).

A long term loss is that fewer AGs "grow up" learning local weather patterns.

Fear not, sometimes the AWC TAFs for civilian airports miss the mark too- fog/low ceilings off by a few hours, a forecast SCT layer turns out to be a ceiling when the time comes, and so on. But only NFWB TAFs have those magical, magical winds.
 

nittany03

Recovering NFO. Herder of Programmers.
pilot
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
A couple more oddities in their computer model, one is it very readily forecasts hail. I think that is an artifact of the freak hailstorm in 2005 that downed nearly all of the TW-5 fleet.
Wow. Talk about a blast from the past; I remember that. I was living permanent party in the Q back when you could do that, and about to move to Meridian. No kidding, the hailstones were the size of freaking softballs. Dented the ever loving shit out of my car. Punched holes in the tar-paper or whatever flat roof of the Q, too, and basically let the rain flood whatever Ivan hadn’t. I was glad to finally move, and get out of the resulting moldfest.
 

Gatordev

Well-Known Member
pilot
Site Admin
Contributor
Interesting. Where do local AGs have the opportunity to interpret raw data and write a TAF? With the centralization of Navy Wx services, I imagine there are very few stations where AGs make local observations.

There are still local people in base weather doing the observation, and sometimes you'll have someone that can "forecast" based on what he's seeing, but that's due to local knowledge. The actual -1 isn't coming from that body. As Fester said, local weather forecasters are few and far between.

When NFWB came online while I was at Whiting, the Yoda of forecasting retired and we did get a replacement, but she couldn't make forecasting calls (hatching a box, over-riding central weather, etc). Not sure if they're is still someone there.

Whenever I’ve been on the road getting the Wx brief from a Navy or USAF base ops, I’ve watched them cut/paste TAF/METAR data directly from the NWS site into the -1.

They may be copying the NWS lines, but the input to NWS for a military field still comes from the military. That can also be witnessed when a field closes and the NWS weather won't have any METARs listed, or it will just say "AUTOMATED." While it's rare nowadays, you'll also occassionally see the NWS military feed not update, even though if you call base weather, they have a new piece of data out.

These days, we mostly just use the aero weather app, which is awesome, then get the -1 for the 3710 check in the box.

But that in itself shows how broken the system is. We're getting our own weather, then taking the multi-million dollar weather system we're paying for just to get the check in the box. Why have the weather office at all? Or at the very least, let us use commercial sources for domestic weather and let NFWB handle OCONUS weather where commercial forecasts may not be available (although even that's a stretch nowadays)?

It's been a year or two since I've been on a weather rant. Guess it was time to let another one out.
 

Pags

N/A
pilot
You’re old.

We noticed the same issue flying at Norfolk years ago. NGU would be calling for the end of the world and ORF would be callings for light rain. Same at Pax. I think an institutional conservatism has crept into USN forecasting due to them getting called out during the incidents above that has resulted in forecasts that aren’t usable and just get ignored. The +TSRAGR TEMPO line was there every day from June through September at Pax which just ended up letting you know that it was summer and that the weathers folks couldn’t tell you squat about where the pop up thunderstorms might occur. The cynic in me says that the weather guessers at civilian fields might have the opposite reaction and may forecast better conditions to keep the revenue flights coming.
 
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