The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is sponsoring a Terminal Ceiling and Visibility (C&V) initiative to provide automated C&V guidance to the air traffic managers for both tactical (0-2 hour) and strategic (3-12 hour) decision making. To meet these requirements, particularly in the strategic time frame, it will most likely be necessary for the C&V system to incorporate guidance from an explicit numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. If NWP forecasts are found to be suitable for this application, they will be used as the backbone of the terminal C&V forecast system. More details on the terminal area C&V forecast product development for the FAA can be found in Allan et al. (2004). Before these NWP forecast products can be used, it is necessary to first characterize their accuracy relative to operational air traffic control (ATC) requirements. This makes it possible to exploit observed strengths, avoid weaknesses, and facilitate a better utilization of NWP forecast products. This study provides an assessment tailored specifically to address the terminal C&V application. Consequently, the results represent forecast performance for relatively small geographic locations that for practical purposes can be considered point forecasts. It is our intention to answer four questions with this preliminary analysis: 1. How accurate are the NWP forecasts relative to the observational truth and a human generated forecast? 2. For the terminals of interest to this study (i.e. New York City Airports), are there any advantages to utilizing a non-hydrostatic mesoscale model run at horizontal resolutions of 3 km or less? 3. Do the NWP models exhibit forecast skill for non-traditional forecast metrics such as trends in C&V parameters and timings of threshold crossings associated with the onset and clearing of low ceiling and visibility conditions? 4. Are there obvious situations/conditions during which the NWP forecasts have more/less skill? In addition to a report on the NWP terminal ceiling and visibility forecast accuracy, we provide preliminary recommendations on the direction we feel this line of research should pursue, and where we see opportunities to utilize NWP forecasts in an automated terminal C&V decision guidance system. An ancillary goal of this study is to assemble the analysis software infrastructure required to quantitatively evaluate numerical forecast accuracy. We envision using these tools to develop and test modifications to the translation algorithms and techniques that will be necessary to integrate the NWP forecasts into the C&V guidance system. They will be instrumental in reducing the time required to make engineering turns during the upcoming development and implementation stages of this research.