The National Weather Service’s (NWS) goal is to maximize aviation safety and air space efficiency by providing the most accurate and timely weather information possible to enhance both pre-flight and in-flight decision making. For decades, NWS has issued text-based AIRMETs that have provided broad-scale descriptions of hazardous weather. Often referred to as a time "smear", the text-based AIRMET requires meteorologists to describe hazardous weather over large geographical areas for six-hour periods. G-AIRMET provides more precise, and informative weather hazard depictions than the text only AIRMET.

Aviation weather users have found that pictures are worth a thousand contractions. G-AIRMETs provide a better path from the aviation meteorologist to the weather user, by providing precise, interactive and easy to understand graphical displays. Meteorologists can put their energy into creating and updating G-AIRMET weather graphics, while the traditional text AIRMET is generated from G-AIRMET information.