The Future of Aviation and Weather Forecasting

by George Spencer, Manager, Air Traffic Systems, Raytheon

Bad weather is the cause of 70 percent of all traffic delays within the U.S. National Airspace System, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), adding about $6.7 billion a year in passenger costs. An estimate from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee puts the annual cost of delayed flights at about $40 billion. That spending also adds up to lost time. In fact, in 2013 alone, the airline industry experienced more than 12 million minutes worth of weather-related delays…..

Modern technology assists the controllers and airline operations centers, which do their best to optimize air traffic flow during a weather event, but delays eventually wreak disorder on the air transportation system, resulting in frustrated travelers and airlines and unplanned costs.

While these air-traffic controllers and planners are well trained to decipher air traffic and the impact of weather on operations, they’re not professionally trained meteorologists. Predicting future weather patterns is not what they trained for or signed up for when taking on such a critical role within the transportation industry. They need technology to deliver accurate representations of the aviation environment including the impact of weather to enable confidence in decision making regarding the impact to both near and longer term operations.

Some 66 percent of delays are preventable with the right data and enhanced air traffic management decision-support tools, so it’s critical that air-traffic personnel work with the most accurate and timely weather information possible. The current landscape of weather data for aviation is scattered across various complex systems that ingest and display a myriad of data to air-traffic controllers and planners. …….

Critical improvements in the management and monitoring of aviation weather data will be absolutely necessary to keep up with the anticipated growth of air traffic over the coming decade — and the technology is already evolving rapidly to accommodate increasingly sophisticated and complex meteorological algorithms.

Imagine a situation where thousands of simultaneous algorithms process gigabytes of data streaming over interconnected networks and flowing into astute algorithms tuned for real-world weather applications, high-performance computing humming in remote server rooms 24/7/365, with redundancy and real-time display of the output across hundreds of systems. This orchestrated concert of events produces the most accurate aviation weather products on the planet, the FAA’s NextGen Weather Processor. In the years ahead, aviation weather forecasting will increase time frames of weather predictability, create more confident and accurate forecasts and provide safer and more efficient travel for passengers.  …….

It’s imperative to have modernized weather sensors, processing and integrated decision support systems in place that will benefit the airspace, all segments of flight, air-traffic controllers, planners, airlines and, of course, passengers. …. Read the complete article.

DCL: There is a lot of CEP in the support systems for what George Spencer is describing. NextGen is indeed  featured as an example of the need for event abstraction hierarchies in “The Power of Events“.