Decoding Guide

Current Icing Potential

Description:

The Current Icing Potential (CIP) product is an automatically generated index of icing potential developed by the In-Flight Icing Product Development Team sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation Weather Research Program. The CIP algorithm combines satellite, radar, surface, lightning and pilot report observations with model output to create a detailed, three-dimensional, hourly diagnosis of the potential for icing and supercooled large droplets (SLD) to exist. It uses a physically based, situational approach that is derived from basic and applied cloud physics, combined with forecaster and on-board flight experience from field programs. Both fuzzy logic and decision tree logic are applied in this context. CIP determines the locations of clouds and precipitation, and then estimates the potential for the presence of supercooled liquid water and supercooled large droplets within a given airspace. CIP provides a real-time diagnoses that allow users to make route-specific decisions to avoid potentially hazardous icing.

Issuance:

Hourly

Data Sources:

Satellite, radar, lightning strikes, surface observations, pilot reports, and model output

Depiction:

Color contours indicate the computed likelihood of airframe icing (either TOTAL or SLD) at the indicated flight level.

Example:



Indicates % probability of structural icing given by the color code