Collaborative Aviation Weather Statement (CAWS)

The CAWS is a National Weather Service (NWS) product collaborated by NWS meteorologists, airline meteorologists, and other airline and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) personnel. The CAWS will be issued for specific, high-impact, thunderstorm events focusing on the Core 29 airports and high traffic sensitive regions. The focus is event-driven, supporting the ability to more effectively initiate, adjust, or terminate planned or active Traffic Management Initiatives (TMI) to balance traffic demand in the constraint locations.

The CAWS will support the identification of National Airspace System (NAS) constraints due to weather that impacts strategic NAS planning. The CAWS initially focuses on convective weather across the CONUS, since convection has historically caused the greatest number of NAS constraints. Describing weather trends and evolving weather events improves the predictability of weather impacts. This improvement will allow ATM decision makers to more effectively initiate, adjust, or terminate planned or active TFM initiatives, resulting in more efficient use of available airspace. The CAWS represents the evolution of the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product (CCFP). Like the CCFP, the CAWS is a collaborative effort between National Weather Service (NWS) at the Aviation Weather Center (AWC), meteorologists at the ATCSCC and the ARTCC Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU), and airline meteorologists. The CAWS replaces the collaborative component of the manual CCFP. The manual CCFP will be replaced by an objectively generated product. The CAWS will be generated, revised, corrected, and cancelled as ATM defined weather conditions (thresholds) of relevance warrant. The FAA and the airline industry will use CAWS to plan, manage, and execute operations in the NAS.

In addition, CAWS may be issued at the request of TFM decision-makers to support their daily strategic planning when more detail about an area of concern is needed than is provided by the schedule-based product (e.g., CCFP).