Significant Updates for the Current Icing Product (CIP) and Forecast Icing Product (FIP) Following the 2019 In-Cloud ICing and Large-drop Experiment (ICICLE)

The Current Icing Product (CIP; Bernstein et al. 2005) and Forecast Icing Product (FIP; Wolff et al. 2009) were originally developed by the United States’ National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) under sponsorship of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the mid 2000’s and provide operational icing guidance to users through the NOAA Aviation Weather Center (AWC). The current operational version of FIP uses the Rapid Refresh (RAP; Benjamin et al. 2016) numerical weather prediction (NWP) model to provide hourly forecasts of Icing Probability, Icing Severity, and Supercooled Large Drop (SLD) Potential. Forecasts are provided out to 18 hours over the Contiguous United States (CONUS) at 15 flight levels between 1,000 ft and FL290, inclusive, and at a 13-km horizontal resolution. CIP provides similar hourly output on the same grid, but utilizes geostationary satellite data, ground-based radar data, Meteorological Terminal Air Reports (METARS), lightning data, and voice pilot reports (PIREPs) in addition to the RAP model output to provide near-realtime icing guidance. This paper presents recent enhancements to the prototype versions of CIP and FIP (CIP v2.0 and FIP v2.0, respectively). The enhancements described are intended to take better advantage of enhanced model resolution and microphysics parameterization as well as state-of-the-art observations for icing diagnosis and forecasting.