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SFO marine stratus forecast system documentation
October 17, 2006
Project Report
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-319
Summary
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) experiences frequent low ceiling conditions during the summer season due to marine stratus clouds. Stratus in the approach zone prevents dual approaches to the airport??s closely spaced parallel runways, effectively reducing arrival capacity by half. The stratus typically behaves on a daily cycle, with dissipation occurring during the hours following sunrise. Often the low ceiling conditions persist throughout the morning hours and interfere with the high rate of air traffic scheduled into SFO from mid-morning to early afternoon. Air traffic managers require accurate forecasts of clearing time to efficiently administer Ground Delay Programs (GDPs) to match the rate of arriving aircraft with expected capacity. The San Francisco Marine Stratus Forecast System was developed as a tool for anticipating the time of stratus clearing. The system relies on field-deployed sensors as well as routinely available regional surface observations and satellite data from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-West). Data are collected, processed, and input to a suite of forecast models to predict the time that the approach zone will be sufficiently clear to perform dual approaches. Data observations and model forecasts are delivered to users on an interactive display accessible via the Internet. The system prototype was developed under the sponsorship of the FAA Aviation Weather Research Program (AWRP). MIT Lincoln Laboratory served as technical lead for the project, in collaboration with San Jose State University, the University of Quebec at Montreal, and the Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU) at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC). The National Weather Service (NWS), under the direction of the NWS Forecast Office in Monterey, assumed responsibility for operation and maintenance of the system following technical transfer in 2004. This document was compiled as a resource to support continuing system operation and maintenance.
Summary
San Francisco International Airport (SFO) experiences frequent low ceiling conditions during the summer season due to marine stratus clouds. Stratus in the approach zone prevents dual approaches to the airport??s closely spaced parallel runways, effectively reducing arrival capacity by half. The stratus typically behaves on a daily cycle, with dissipation...
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Corridor Integrated Weather System
June 1, 2006
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 59-80.
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Flight delays are now a major problem in the U.S. National Airspace System. A significant fraction of these delays are caused by reductions in en route capacity due to severe convective weather. The Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) is a fully automated weather analysis and forecasting system designed to support the development and execution of convective weather impact mitigation plans for congested en route airspace. The CIWS combines data from dozens of weather radars with satellite data, surface observations, and numerical weather models to dramatically improve the accuracy and timeliness of the storm severity information and to provide state-of-the-art, accurate, automated, high-resolution, animated three-dimensional forecasts of storms (including explicit detection of storm growth and decay). Real-time observations of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) decision making process during convective weather at Air Route Traffic Control Centers in the Midwest and Northeast have shown that the CIWS enables the FAA users to achieve more efficient tactical use of the airspace, reduce traffic manager workload, and significantly reduce delays. A real-time data-fusion architecture to assist in national deployment of CIWS is under development, and the CIWS products are being used in integrated air traffic management decision support systems.
Summary
Flight delays are now a major problem in the U.S. National Airspace System. A significant fraction of these delays are caused by reductions in en route capacity due to severe convective weather. The Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) is a fully automated weather analysis and forecasting system designed to support...
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Integrating advanced weather forecast technologies into air traffic management decision support
June 1, 2006
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 81-96.
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Explicit integration of aviation weather forecasts with the National Airspace System (NAS) structure is needed to improve the development and execution of operationally effective weather impact mitigation plans and has become increasingly important due to NAS congestion and associated increases in delay. This article considers several contemporary weather-air traffic management (ATM) integration applications: the use of probabilistic forecasts of visibility at San Francisco, the Route Availability Planning Tool to facilitate departures from the New York airports during thunderstorms, the estimation of en route capacity in convective weather, and the application of mixed-integer optimization techniques to air traffic management when the en route and terminal capacities are varying with time because of convective weather impacts. Our operational experience at San Francisco and New York coupled with very promising initial results of traffic flow optimizations suggests that weather-ATM integrated systems warrant significant research and development investment. However, they will need to be refined through rapid prototyping at facilities with supportive operational users.
Summary
Explicit integration of aviation weather forecasts with the National Airspace System (NAS) structure is needed to improve the development and execution of operationally effective weather impact mitigation plans and has become increasingly important due to NAS congestion and associated increases in delay. This article considers several contemporary weather-air traffic management...
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Operational evaluation of runway status lights
June 1, 2006
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 123-146.
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Summary
To maintain safe separation of aircraft on the airport surface, air traffic controllers issue verbal clearances to pilots to sequence aircraft arrivals, departures, and runway crossings. Although controllers and pilots work together successfully most of the time, mistakes do occasionally happen, causing several hundred runway incursions a year and, less frequently, near misses and collisions in the United States. With this rate of incursions, it is imperative to have an independent warning system as a backup to the current system. Runway status lights, a system of automated, surveillance-driven stoplights, have been designed to provide this backup function. The lights are installed at runway-taxiway intersections and at departure points along the runways. They provide a clear signal to pilots crossing or departing from a runway, warning them of potential conflicts with traffic already on the runway. Existing FAA-installed radar surveillance is coupled with Lincoln Laboratory-developed algorithms to generate the light commands. To be compatible with operations at the busiest airports, the algorithms must drive the lights such that during normal operations pilots will almost never encounter a red light when it is safe to cross or depart from a runway. A minimal error rate must be maintained even in the face of inevitable imperfections in the surveillance system used to drive the safety logic. A prototype runway status light system has been designed at Lincoln Laboratory and installed at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, where Laboratory personnel have worked with the FAA to complete an operational evaluation of the system, demonstrating the feasibility of runway status lights in the challenging, complex environment of one of the world's busiest airports.
Summary
To maintain safe separation of aircraft on the airport surface, air traffic controllers issue verbal clearances to pilots to sequence aircraft arrivals, departures, and runway crossings. Although controllers and pilots work together successfully most of the time, mistakes do occasionally happen, causing several hundred runway incursions a year and, less...
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Surveillance accuracy requirements in support of separation services
June 1, 2006
Journal Article
Published in:
Lincoln Laboratory Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 97-122.
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The Federal Aviation Administration is modernizing the Air Traffic Control system to improve flight efficiency, to increase airspace capacity, to reduce flight delays, and to control operating costs as the demand for air travel continues to grow. Promising new surveillance technologies such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast and multisensor track fusion offer the potential to augment the ground-based surveillance and controller-display systems by providing more timely and complete information about aircraft. The resulting improvement in surveillance accuracy may potentially allow the expanded use of the minimum safe-separation distance between aircraft. However, these new technologies cannot be introduced with today's radar-separation standards, because they assume surveillance will be provided only through radar technology. In this article, we review the background of aircraft surveillance and the establishment of radar separation standards. The required surveillance accuracy to safely support aircraft separation with National Airspace System technologies is then derived from currently widely used surveillance systems. We end with flight test validation of the derived results, which can be used to evaluate new technologies.
Summary
The Federal Aviation Administration is modernizing the Air Traffic Control system to improve flight efficiency, to increase airspace capacity, to reduce flight delays, and to control operating costs as the demand for air travel continues to grow. Promising new surveillance technologies such as Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast and multisensor track...
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A characterization of NWP ceiling and visibility forecasts for the terminal airspace
January 29, 2006
Conference Paper
Published in:
86th AMS Annual Meeting, 1st Symp. on Policy Research, 2006.
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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.
Summary
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...
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Safety analysis for advanced separatation concepts
January 7, 2006
Journal Article
Published in:
Air Traffic Control Q., Vol. 14, No. 1, 2006, pp. 5-24.
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Advanced separation assurance concepts involving higher degrees of automation must meet the challenge of maintaining safety in the presence of inevitable subsystem faults, including the complete failure of the supporting automation infrastructure. This paper examines the types of design features and safeguards that might be used to preserve safety in a highly automated environment. The Advanced Airspace Concept (AAC) being developed by NASA is used as the basis for a fault-tree analysis. Multiple layers of protection, with carefully specified fault management strategies, appear to be important to achieving the desired level of safety.
Summary
Advanced separation assurance concepts involving higher degrees of automation must meet the challenge of maintaining safety in the presence of inevitable subsystem faults, including the complete failure of the supporting automation infrastructure. This paper examines the types of design features and safeguards that might be used to preserve safety in...
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Improving air traffic management during thunderstorms
October 30, 2005
Conference Paper
Published in:
24th AIAA/IEEE Digital Avionics Systems Conf., 30 October - 3 November 2005, pp. 3.D.2-1 - 3.D.2-13.
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This paper discusses inter-related studies and development activities that address the significant challenges of implementing Air Traffic Management initiatives in airspace impacted by thunderstorms. We briefly describe current thrusts that will improve the quality and precision of thunderstorm forecasts, work in progress to convert these forecasts into estimates of future airspace capacity, and an initiative to develop a robust ATM optimization model based on future capacity estimates with associated uncertainty bounds. We conclude with a discussion of the thunderstorm ATM problem in the context of future advanced airspace management concepts.
Summary
This paper discusses inter-related studies and development activities that address the significant challenges of implementing Air Traffic Management initiatives in airspace impacted by thunderstorms. We briefly describe current thrusts that will improve the quality and precision of thunderstorm forecasts, work in progress to convert these forecasts into estimates of future...
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Assessment of aviation delay reduction benefits for nowcasts and short term forecasts
September 5, 2005
Conference Paper
Published in:
World Weather Research Program Symp. on Nowcasting and Very Short Term Forecasts, 5-9 September 2005.
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This paper investigates methods for quantifying aviation convective weather delay reduction benefits for nowcasts and short term forecasts.
Summary
This paper investigates methods for quantifying aviation convective weather delay reduction benefits for nowcasts and short term forecasts.
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Operational benefits of the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) at Atlanta
July 15, 2005
Project Report
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-320
Summary
This report summarizes the results of an initial study to estimate the yearly delay reduction provided by the initial operational capability (IOC) Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). Specific objectives of this initial study were to: (1) analyze convective weather operations at ATL to determine major causes of convective weather delay and how those might be modeled quantitatively. (2) provide estimates of the ATL ITWS delay reduction based on the "Decision/Modeling" method using questionnaires and interviews with Atlanta Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) and Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) operational ITWS users. (3)assess the "reasonableness" of the model-based delay reduction estimates by comparing those savings with estimates of the actual weather-related arrival delays at ATL. In addition, the reasonableness of model-based delay reduction estimates was assessed by determining the average delay savings per ATL flight during times when adverse convective weather is within the coverage of the ATL ITWS. (4)conduct an exploratory study confirming the ATL ITWS delay savings by comparing Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) database delays pre- and post-ITWS at ATL. (5) assess the accuracy of the "downstream" delay model employed in this study by analyzing ASPM data from a major US airline, and (6) make recommendations for follow-on studies of the ITWS delay reduction at Atlanta and other IOC ITWS facilities. [not complete]
Summary
This report summarizes the results of an initial study to estimate the yearly delay reduction provided by the initial operational capability (IOC) Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). Specific objectives of this initial study were to: (1) analyze convective weather operations at ATL to determine...
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