Convective Weather Avoidance Modeling for Low-Altitude Routes

摘要

Convective weather is a significant impediment to effective and efficient Air Traffic Management (ATM) decisions, and sometimes results in unnecessary delays to the National Airspace System (NAS). 70% of delays in the NAS are caused by weather, and of those delays, 60% are specifically accounted for by convective weather. Currently, rerouting decisions made by air traffic managers are aided by weather products such as the Corridor Integrated Weather System (CTWS) and the National Convective Weather Forecast (NCWF) (2,3). While these products provide a high quality representation of storm activity, it is difficult to predict the NAS impact from data based solely on the weather. In a Next Generation ATM system, a decision support tool such as the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) will mitigate weather-induced delays by supplementing the situational awareness of an air traffic manager with a forecast of the availability of specific flight routes. The RAPT tool is based on the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which is a probabilistic model of pilot decision making in the presence of corrective weather. The output of CWAM is a three dimensional weather avoidance field (WAF), which is a probability map of the likelihood that a pilot will deviate at a specific position and time given the current and forecasted weather.