New Role of Weather in NextGen

Browsing U.S. news headlines in the past year, there is no shortage of stories about frustrated passengers caught in air travel delays. Approximately 70 percent of those delays are attributed to poor weather conditions, said the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) Director Charles Leader in a joint statement before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Subcommittee on Aviation, in May 2007.

One focus of the JPDO and its partner departments and agencies is to alleviate the majority of weather’s impact in the National Airspace System (NAS). To achieve this Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) goal, it is recognized that a major paradigm shift is needed in dealing with weather-related issues. With support from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce (NOAA/DOC), and the Department of Defense (DoD), the JPDO has developed a robust vision of weather in the future of aviation.

NextGen will offer users access to enhanced weather capabilities based on an integrated, consistent “common weather picture,” a forecast system providing probabilistic weather information and direct integration of weather information into operational decision-making.

Mark Andrews, JPDO Weather Working Group Government Co-chair, said that “increased situational awareness will assist aircraft to navigate around convective weather for safer air travel.” He added that the additional capability, which provides aircraft access to probabilistic forecasts, will allow sufficient lead time for smarter decision-making on re-routing. In general aviation, weather is a contributing or causal factor in 87 percent of all accidents.

Such capabilities are also expected to enable a more flexible air traffic management system while maintaining the priorities of safety and efficiency in air transportation. “For passengers traveling in the NAS,” Mr. Andrews said, “improved weather capabilities translates to a reduction of up to $1.2 billion annually in economic losses due to delay.”

An important innovation at the heart of weather in NextGen is the development of a Four-Dimensional (4-D) Weather Cube. While the concept has been around for decades, technology advancements such as broadband communications and computing capability finally appear to make it feasible. 

The “Weather Cube” is designed to incorporate multiple observation and forecast systems to generate a series of probabilities for various weather occurrences. The weather information, which will include the traditional information of latitude, longitude, and altitude, and a fourth dimension of time, will directly feed into automated decision-making algorithms within the operational system.

After the weather information is collected from global sources and automatically processed, it is then efficiently and effectively shared among users (such as airline operators and pilots). The output of weather impacts, based on individual user preferences, will be in comprehensible terminologies for easy understanding by all users.

Integrating the 4-D Weather Cube into NextGen will allow pilots, controllers, airline operators, and even passengers to know how the system is being impacted by weather at the present moment or some time in the future. The “Weather Cube” is scheduled to be initially operational in 2013, with increasing annual deliverables.

One effort that will be leveraged in this initiative is the U.S. Air Force's Joint Environmental Toolkit (JET) program. With incremental deliveries of enhanced capability, the JET program will provide a next generation system which replaces disparate legacy Air Force weather systems with a single, integrated capability that provides tailorable weather products to applicable DoD Command and Control system user-interfaces. Bruce Lambert, Deputy Director of Weather for Federal Programs, U.S. Air Force, DoD, said work is underway to leverage JET capabilities in the NextGen 4-D Weather Cube. The FAA, NOAA/DOC, and NASA are also contributing current and future research and implementation efforts towards the 4-D Weather Cube.

Full benefits to passengers, pilots, controllers and operators will be seen in the 2018-2020 time frame. According to Mr. Andrews, better managing weather is key. “While you can’t control the weather, you can control how you deal with it.”

For more information on the Next Generation Air Transportation System, please visit www.jpdo.gov.

Return to Connecting News May 2008