The FAA Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP) is an initiative of the Weather and Flight Service Systems Integrated Product Team, AUA400. One of the goals of the AWRP is to create accurate and accessible forecasts of hazardous weather tailored to the needs of the aviation community. Pursuant to this goal, the AWRP has sponsored the collaboration of the Research Applications Program (RAP) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the Aviation and Forecast Research Divisions at the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), the Weather Sensing Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory (MIT/LL) and the National Severe Storm Laboratory (NSSL) on a Product Development Team (PDT). This Convective Weather PDT is developing an automated system that combines real-time weather- radar data with the current "state-of-the-art" convective weather prediction algorithms to produce forecasts of convective weather for the heavily traveled air traffic routes in the Great Lakes/Northeast corridor (Chicago to New York). This Regional Convective Weather Forecast (RCWF) will be provided to traffic flow management decision-makers as part of the proof-of-concept Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS), which began operations in July 2001 with a l-hr animated Regional Convective Weather Forecast (RCWF).