T
he Australian aviation Area
Forecast (ARFOR) has been
around for as long as any of us can
remember. While it can contain
lots of information, everything has
to be verbalised. That works well
for phones and teletype machines,
but it’s not that easily read or
applied, and modern forecast detail
can make it rather long winded.
There’s no one left who can tell
us what f lying was like in 1928,
which was the year that the FAA’s
predecessor first used a teletype
machine to transmit a weather
report. When the Southern Cloud
was lost in 1931, aviation forecasts
were largely an educated guess.
Conveyed with limited words and
a national weather chart, they
barely differed from what was
printed in newspapers of the time.
The computers of the 1970s
made it possible for forecasters
to work with huge volumes of
weather data, and forecasts
became more comprehensive.
Extensive use of the telephoneallowed briefings to be provided to
any pilot, even when far away from
a briefing office.
One major constraint dogged
the teletype, telephone, and early
computer systems, and that was
their inherent limitation to text.
Only able to deal with written
words and numbers, there was no
way these systems could distribute
pictures or images: everything
in an aviation weather forecast
needed to be said in words.
Over time, automated
observations and advanced
computer models have made it
possible to forecast weather more
accurately, further in future, and
in more specific, smaller areas.
In aviation these improvements
were ref lected in detailed
subdivisions within ARFORs, more
and more often. But subdivisions
make a forecast hard for humans to
read, and unless a pilot is intimately
familiar with the area, usually can’t
be interpreted without plotting the
areas on a chart.Worth a Thousand Words
54 Graphical Weather Forecasts ANDREW ANDERSEN
AUSTRALIAN FLYING November – December 2017The time-honoured ARFOR is being
replaced on 9 November 2017 with a
graphical, state-based area forecast
product. Andrew Andersen was part
of the industry working group that
helped make it happen.
Pictures,
Aviation Weather Forecast Chart 1950sVICTORIAN EDUCATION DEPARTMENT/ CAHS COLLECTION