Weather information used in international air navigation is currently exchanged as products directly used by airline operators (e.g. dispatch, pilot).
In the future, this same weather information will be exchanged using the ICAO Meteorological Information Exchange Model (IWXXM), which includes extensible markup language (XML)/ geography markup language (GML), that is intended to be ingested by software to produce tailored information according to each airline operator’s needs.
To facilitate this shift in providing weather information for international air navigation, many products listed in the Chicago Convention Annex 3, Meteorological Service for International Air Navigation, will need to be exchanged using ICAO IWXXM by November 2020.
To support States in the EUR/NAT Region in their implementation of this transition, a number of activities are taking place.
An ICAO Meteorological Information Exchange Model (IWXXM) Implementation Workshop was held at the ICAO EUR/NAT Regional Office in Paris from 17 to 18 May 2017.
The workshop was attended by a total of 56 participants from 23 States, 2 industry stakeholders and 2 international organizations (World Meteorological Organization and ICAO).
The workshop achieved the following:
- States and industry exchanged information on the implementation of IWXXM in the EUR Region;
- Developed a list of outstanding IWXXM implementation issues to be addressed in the upcoming months/years by the experts of the Meteorology Panel (METP) Working Group on Meteorological Information Exchange (WG-MIE);
- Developed a roadmap for the update of various supporting documents;
- Agreed to provide updates on IWXXM implementation in the EUR Region;
- Agreed to provide a summary of the IWXXM implementation in the EUR Region to the Inter-regional APAC/EUR/MID Seminar on ‘service improvement through integration of AIM, MET and ATM information’ held at Eurocontrol from 2 to 4 October 2017; and
- Agreed to conduct another IWXXM implementation workshop at the end of 2018.
This article was originally written for the ICAO EUR/NAT Office’s Newsletter (Issue 2) on October 2017. A full list of their newsletters can be found here.