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Preliminary UAS Weather Research Roadmap(1.51 MB)

November 3, 2017
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
Project Report ATC-438, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Topic:
UAS
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

A companion Lincoln Laboratory report (ATC-437, “Preliminary Weather Information Gaps for UAS Operations”) identified initial gaps in the ability of current weather products to meet the needs of UAS operations. Building off of that work, this report summarizes the development of a proposed initial roadmap for research to fill the gaps that were identified.
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Summary

A companion Lincoln Laboratory report (ATC-437, “Preliminary Weather Information Gaps for UAS Operations”) identified initial gaps in the ability of current weather products to meet the needs of UAS operations. Building off of that work, this report summarizes the development of a proposed initial roadmap for research to fill the...

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Preliminary UAS Weather Research Roadmap

Preliminary Weather Information Gap Analysis for UAS Operations(4.88 MB)

November 2, 2017
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
Project Report ATC-437, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Topic:
UAS
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing. For example, 2017 has seen dramatically increased low altitude UAS usage for disaster relief and by first responders. The ability to carry out these operations, however, can be strongly impacted by adverse weather conditions. This report documents a preliminary quick-look identification and assessment of gaps in current weather decision support for UAS operations.
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Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing. For example, 2017 has seen dramatically increased low altitude UAS usage for disaster relief and by first responders. The ability to carry out these operations, however, can be strongly impacted by adverse weather conditions. This report...

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Preliminary Weather Information Gap Analysis for UAS Operations

Preliminary weather information gap analysis for UAS operations, revision 1

November 2, 2017
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-437-REV-1
Topic:
weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing. For example, 2017 has seen dramatically increased low altitude UAS usage for disaster relief and by first responders. The ability to carry out these operations, however, can be strongly impacted by adverse weather conditions. This report documents a preliminary quick-look identification and assessment of gaps in current weather decision support for UAS operations. An initial set of surveys and interviews with UAS operators identified 12 major gaps. These gaps were then prioritized based on the importance of the weather phenomena to UAS operations and the current availability of adequate weather information to UAS operators. Low altitude UAS operations are of particular concern. The lack of observations of ceiling, visibility, and winds near most low altitude UAS operational locations causes the validation of numerical weather forecasts of weather conditions for those locations to be the highest priority. Hazardous weather alerting for convective activity and strong surface winds are a major concern for UAS operations that could be addressed in part by access to existing FAA real time conventional aircraft weather products.
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Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing. For example, 2017 has seen dramatically increased low altitude UAS usage for disaster relief and by first responders. The ability to carry out these operations, however, can be strongly impacted by adverse weather conditions. This report...

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Preliminary weather information gap analysis for UAS operations, revision 1

UAS weather research roadmap

October 23, 2017
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-438
Topic:
weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing, and the trend is expected to continue as regulations are refined to allow broader access to the airspace. The unique characteristics of UAS (e.g., extensive operations in populated areas at altitudes below 500 feet, speed capability, and control systems) may drive the need for new and unique operational strategies, many of which are highly dependent on weather conditions. The objective of this study is to identify information gaps in the ability of current weather products to meet the needs of UAS operations, and provide a roadmap of research required to fill the gaps. There are several trends in the information gaps that surfaced repeatedly. A key item is the availability of weather observations, and forecasts tailored for on-airport operations are not necessarily sufficient for off-airport operations. Surveyed users indicated that airport-specific weather information (e.g., METAR, TAFs, etc.) do not readily translate to conditions at remote launch locations, which may be 10-30 miles from the nearest airport, and are influenced by local terrain, vegetation, and water sources. Moreover, the results show significantly less weather information available to support low-altitude flight than for typical manned-flight profiles. Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations are found to have higher need for weather forecasts, uncertainty information, and contingency planning than Visual Line of Sight (VLOS) operations. Furthermore, the study identifies specific gaps related to how the airspace should be managed to mitigate safety and efficiency impacts to UAS operations. The research roadmap is composed of research recommendations that are derived from the aforementioned weather information gaps. In total, there are 14 specific recommendations that define the roadmap. The first two recommendations are not explicitly tied to specific gaps; rather they are based on lessons learned through the course of research in this study. The remaining recommendations are ordered such that their priority is based on their overall significance to the operation, the maturity of the operation, and any dependence among other recommendations.
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Summary

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in the National Airspace System (NAS) are rapidly increasing, and the trend is expected to continue as regulations are refined to allow broader access to the airspace. The unique characteristics of UAS (e.g., extensive operations in populated areas at altitudes below 500 feet, speed capability...

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UAS weather research roadmap

Air traffic decision analysis during convective weather events in arrival airspace

September 17, 2012
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
12th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conf. and 14th AIAA/ISSM, 17-19 September 2012.
Topic:
air traffic management
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Decision making during convective weather events in the terminal area is shared among pilots and air traffic management, where uninformed decisions can result in wide-spread cascading delays with high-level impacts. Future traffic management systems capable of predicting terminal impacts will mitigate these unnecessary delays; however in order to realize this vision, it is important to understand the decision mechanisms behind convective weather avoidance. This paper utilizes an arrival adaptation of the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM) to investigate the catalysts for arrival traffic management decision making. The analysis is broken down by category of terminal airspace structure in addition to the type of decision. The results show that pilot behavior in convective weather is heavily dependent on the terminal airspace structure. In addition, pilot and air traffic management decisions in convective weather can be discriminated with large-scale weather features.
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Summary

Decision making during convective weather events in the terminal area is shared among pilots and air traffic management, where uninformed decisions can result in wide-spread cascading delays with high-level impacts. Future traffic management systems capable of predicting terminal impacts will mitigate these unnecessary delays; however in order to realize this...

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Air traffic decision analysis during convective weather events in arrival airspace

Evaluation of the Convective Weather Avoidance Model for arrival traffic

September 17, 2012
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
12th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conf. and 14th AIAA/ISSM, 17-19 September 2012.
Topic:
air traffic management
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

The effective management of traffic flows during convective weather events in congested air space requires decision support tools that can translate weather information into anticipated air traffic operational impact. In recent years, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has been maturing the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM) to correlate pilot behavior in the enroute airspace with observable weather parameters from convective weather forecast systems. This paper evaluates the adaptation of the CWAM to terminal airspace with a focus on arrival decision making. The model is trained on data from five days of terminal convective weather impacts. The performance of the model is evaluated on an independent dataset consisting of six days of convective weather over a variety of terminal areas. Model performance in different terminal areas is discussed and the sensitivity of prediction accuracy to weather forecast horizon is presented.
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Summary

The effective management of traffic flows during convective weather events in congested air space requires decision support tools that can translate weather information into anticipated air traffic operational impact. In recent years, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has been maturing the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM) to correlate pilot behavior in the...

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Evaluation of the Convective Weather Avoidance Model for arrival traffic

Convective weather avoidance modeling in low-altitude airspace

August 8, 2011
  |
Conference Paper
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conf., 8-11 August 2011.
Topic:
aviation weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to convective weather in a given area. This paper extends the scope of CWAM to include low-altitude flights, which typically occur below the tops of convective weather and have slightly different operational constraints. In general, the set of low-altitude flights includes short-hop routes and low-altitude escape routes used to reduce the impact of convective weather in the terminal area. This paper will discuss the classification procedure, present the performance of low-altitude CWAM on observed and forecasted weather, analyze areas of poor performance, and suggest potential improvements to the model.
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Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to...

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Convective weather avoidance modeling in low-altitude airspace

Convective weather avoidance modeling for low-altitude routes

May 31, 2011
  |
Project Report
Author:
Scot E. Campbell
…
Published in:
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Report ATC-376
Topic:
weather
R&D area:
R&D group:

Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to convective weather in a given area. This report extends the scope of CWAM to include low-altitude flights, which typically occur below the tops of convective weather and have slightly differentoperational constraints. In general, the set of low-altitude flights include short-hop routes and low-altitude escape routes used to reduce the impact of convective weather in the termnial area. For classification, low altitude flights are identified as either deviations or non-deviations, and the corresponding weather features are analyzed. Precipitation intensity is observed to be the best predictor of deviation in the low-altitude flight regime, as compared to the differenc ein altitude between the flight and the echo tops for en route flights. Additionally, the low-altitude CWAM performs better than the departure CWAM currently used in the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) when tested on deterministic weather data.
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Summary

Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilots will avoid during a storm. An example of such research is the Convective Weather Avoidance Model (CWAM), which provides the likelihood of pilot deviation due to...

READ MORE
Convective weather avoidance modeling for low-altitude routes
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