Does the military do their own TAFs?

ArrowFlyer86

ArrowFlyer86

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I ask, because a lot of the TAF reports I see for military bases frequently disagree with surrounding TAFs and objectively speaking they look.... wrong.
KBIF is one example, or pertinent to me today is KFTK. KBIF is like 5 miles from KELP and I've seen it report obviously wrong information when compared to El Paso real weather. Makes me wonder if military has their own forecasters...

EDIT: Deleted commentary about KFTK because I failed to look further west :)
 
Yeah KBIF uses AF personnel for weather observations / forecasting. Army has their own meteorologists but I’ve never seen them on Army AAFs. And the TAFs can look quite different from surrounding TAFs.
 
Glad to know I'm not crazy.
I recall KBIF reporting something like "ice pellets" when it was 80F out, while KELP was reporting clear skies. Started to make me think military bases just had an automated process running amok that no one monitored lol
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
Glad to know I'm not crazy.
I recall KBIF reporting something like "ice pellets" when it was 80F out, while KELP was reporting clear skies. Started to make me think military bases just had an automated process running amok that no one monitored lol
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Air force...he was busy ordering his drink and got it mixed up with the forecast.
 
GeorgeC said:
In my experience, so consistently anomalous that I no longer bother to look at them.
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Well I never really compared them to their civ counterparts as to which one is more accurate. But, there were several times comparing my 175-1 from Hunter AAF vs KSAV right up the road and they’d conflict. Who’s better at forecasting? IDK.
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
I ask, because a lot of the TAF reports I see for military bases frequently disagree with surrounding TAFs and objectively speaking they look.... wrong.
KBIF is one example, or pertinent to me today is KFTK. KBIF is like 5 miles from KELP and I've seen it report obviously wrong information when compared to El Paso real weather. Makes me wonder if military has their own forecasters...
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Yes. KEFD is a joint civil/military field, but the weather reports come from the military side. The forecasts are usually more pessimistic than KHOU, which is only 6.5 nm away, and KHOU is generally more accurate. It's annoying for me, because EFD is about halfway between my home drome and HOU, so it'd be nice if they had forecasts that were more believable.
 
Jim_R said:
Yes. KEFD is a joint civil/military field, but the weather reports come from the military side. The forecasts are usually more pessimistic than KHOU, which is only 6.5 nm away, and KHOU is generally more accurate. It's annoying for me, because EFD is about halfway between my home drome and HOU, so it'd be nice if they had forecasts that were more believable.
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How does that work for IFR in being required to have an alternate if the nearest TAF to your airport is military, much more pessimistic and at odds with what a neighboring (better) airport is reporting? Can you cherry-pick the TAF you want to use to justify not filing an alternate?
 
ArrowFlyer86 said:
How does that work for IFR in being required to have an alternate if the nearest TAF to your airport is military, much more pessimistic and at odds with what a neighboring (better) airport is reporting? Can you cherry-pick the TAF you want to use to justify not filing an alternate?
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My home drome doesn't have a TAF so if the weather isn't severe clear, I usually file an alternate. I'm not flying unless the weather is pretty reasonable, and so it's rare that even the pessimistic forecast at EFD doesn't satisfy alternate requirements. At least once, though, I used HOU as my alternate because the EFD TAF was ridiculous, even though I have no intention of ever landing at HOU.

In practice, for any weather I am willing to fly in, EFD has approaches that will get me down if I can't use the single approach at my home drome (which can happen if winds don't favor the single approach there but clouds are lower than the circling minimums). If weather deteriorates such that EFD is unusable, then things have gotten pretty bad, and I am probably diverting far away from my intended destination anyway.
 
I notice this too in the DC area as well. The Davison AAF and Joint Base Andrews TAFs are often wildly different from DCA, IAD, and BWI. Generally the civilian TAFs seem to more closely resemble reality.
 
The following is a very biased opinion of military job assignments. There is a certain amount of pot luck on who goes to what training.



Why do the military airports have separate weather reporting? To develop or maintain weather skills for when they are deployed to a combat zone.

Obviously many are not up to the standard of the civilian weather forecasters.
This is partly because the civilians are career from their first employment, and part from continuing to work weather until 65. The simply have the experience that the military does not.

Military most likely were assigned to weather school in service by a fairly skilled clerk, and trained, whether they liked it or not. As a 2 year veteran, I had no personal input in my selection of signal school radio repair, but it was an excellent fit, and the Army benefitted. The guys that were selected for radio operator were a distinctly less educated, and less versatile in their crossover skills.
They would be more like those sent to weather school.

Again, I was a draftee, had very good skills when I went in, consistently excelled in all assignments, and never failed to be promoted as soon as I had the required time in grade. I also refused direct entry into OCS from basic training because I did not wish to be in more than 2 years. In those 2 years, I was associated with a wide variation of match and mismatch of skills and work assignment. Most of the time, the Army had it right.
 
Does anyone do manual analysis anymore, or is it all computer models?
 
Ed Haywood said:
Does anyone do manual analysis anymore, or is it all computer models?
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If you read the forecast discussion, they will often describe inconsistencies between models, and why they decided to include precip or thunderstorm probabilities. So there’s definitely manual interpretation of the model results going on.
 
AlleyCat67 said:
If you read the forecast discussion, they will often describe inconsistencies between models, and why they decided to include precip or thunderstorm probabilities. So there’s definitely manual interpretation of the model results going on.
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So who is doing that? Does each airfield have someone, or is it done on a regional/national basis by someone at NOAA?
 
WPAFB (FFO) TAF is always more pessimistic than KDAY which is about 5 miles away. Been true at least for the past 15 years since I have been looking at them.
 
my assumption has been that there is a weather office in Dayton that generates all TAFs for the military. They seem to employ Chicken Little to develop the forecasts.
 
TCABM said:
Close. Regionally aligned Operational Weather Squadrons generate those TAFs, iirc.

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I think Navy / Marine use their own system but could be wrong? I think it’s amazing today with all the automation that base ops people and weather forecasters are still at military airfields. I started off old school with paper filing and walking across the hall for my brief. By the time I retired, I did all of that online.
 
Velocity173 said:
I think Navy / Marine use their own system but could be wrong? I think it’s amazing today with all the automation that base ops people and weather forecasters are still at military airfields. I started off old school with paper filing and walking across the hall for my brief. By the time I retired, I did all of that online.
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I can’t speak for USN/MC weather ops. Mind you, CCT and Combat Weather do provide are trained to and provide observations in austere locations.
 
Drove me crazy for 21 years. So glad I don't have to deal with USAF wx folks anymore... It's awful.
 
They are CYA reports. Nothing More. “Predict TEMPO +TSRA every day from May-Oct” and you wont be the shiny thing to read about in a future mishap report. Or a squadron CO wont call to chew your guys out when a bunch of low fuel jets had to divert. They wont have a leg to stand on calling to complain that a bunch of lost training occurred because Hurricane Andrew was forecast to make landfall every day when it was actually just a bunch of scattered cumulus and great weather.
 
yeah, what the folks above said. It's an awful product, widely known as the product of perennial OJT in most military support functions, and I include even parts of medical in that. Digressing.

We are ordered to honor it for flight planning, which leads to a lot of mismatched sorties and lost training. If we really wanted to get after it we could make an appeal to the taxpayers as to how much the OJT mentality of the military breeds apathy towards waste of taxpayer funds, but it would fall on deaf ears. So we just nod our heads, use the civil products for actualy no crap life saving decision making, and when it conflicts with mil weather we just lose the training, waste the fuel on bogus divert calls, and everybody shrugs shoulders.

Long story short, as a civ you don't have that handicap, disregard the product.
 
Yeah, we are fortunate to have a civilian field like 30 straight line miles from here with 121 service, and very similar (though occasionally worse) weather patterns. I can't really legally rely on it, and to be fair it isn't exactly the same micro climate, but it is a good sanity check if we are comparing to unusually bad Navy TAFs. I do spend a lot of time trying to learn about the weather patterns here though. Forecasting in this area is challenging, but I have found some good meteorologists locally to watch. Unfortunately they don't have the granular level needed for aviation decision making. But pretty good for knowing if it will be a good afternoon to grill
 
Tonight’s a perfect example of military TAF inconsistencies. KMGE is reporting doom and gloom in the AM while everything around them is reporting good. We’ll see if the AF leads the way tonight! :)
 
scottd said:
The NWS local weather forecast offices issue these point forecasts as I wrote in this FLYING magazine article and this one in my blog. Yes, the military will issue their own TAFs. Military TAFs use BECMG groups whereas the NWS does not. That's the easiest way to know if they are issued by the military or by the NWS. Also, the NWS has a lot of outside pressure from the FAA and the airlines in certain situations. For example, you might see a military TAF show TSRA and a nearby commercial airport show SHRA, VCSH or no convective forecast at all. Airlines urge the NWS to avoid adding TS in the TAF when there's a lot of uncertainty so they don't have to file an alternate and carry extra fuel. The military doesn't have these pressures so you will likely see convective forecasts appear more frequently in military TAFs.

Also, here in Charlotte, the FAA doesn't like to see a wind forecast for 270 or 090 come from the forecasters at the Greenville-Spartanburg forecast office located in Greer, SC. That's because KCLT has north-south runways. A forecast for 270 or 090 doesn't give them an idea if they will need to run a north or south operation as the winds shift. So you will usually see a 280 or 260 wind forecast.
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Stupid question, but can't they just choose preferred flow if wind is 090/270 and xw favors neither? Picking one arbitrarily to appease seems practical but no better than just having the airport pick a flow direction based on agnostic wx forecast.

OTOH, the TSRA makes total sense.
 
scottd said:
Also, the NWS has a lot of outside pressure from the FAA and the airlines in certain situations. For example, you might see a military TAF show TSRA and a nearby commercial airport show SHRA, VCSH or no convective forecast at all. Airlines urge the NWS to avoid adding TS in the TAF when there's a lot of uncertainty so they don't have to file an alternate and carry extra fuel. The military doesn't have these pressures so you will likely see convective forecasts appear more frequently in military TAFs.
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I knew it!!! I have noticed that, for example, there are a lot of TAFs that forecast the weather right at minimums or other "cutoff" conditions, but almost never below. I figured they had to be fudging the numbers just a wee bit for operational purposes.
 
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