Publications
Weather radar development and application programs
Summary
Summary
Weather phenomena such as microburst wind shear and severe thunderstorms are major concerns to the aviation industry. A number of significant airplane accidents have resulted from wind-shear encounters during takeoff and landing, and thunderstorms are a major contributor to airplane delay. Providing fully automated and timely warnings of these phenomena...
Weather sensing and data fusion to improve safety and reduce delays at major west coast airports
Summary
Summary
The objective of this study was to analyze the weather sensing and data fusion required to improve safety and reduce delays at a number of west coast airports that are not currently scheduled to receive an Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS). This report considers the Los Angeles (LAX), San Francisco...
Achieving higher integrity in NEXRAD products through multi-sensor integration
Summary
Summary
The initial operational concept for the NEXRAD focused on support for the operational forecaster based on longstanding practice in use of weather radars by the National Weather Service (NWS) and Air Force as well as difficulties in developing reliable, fully automated phenomena detection algorithms [Crum, 1998]. By contrast, achieving high...
Addressing the weather delay problems of the New York City airports with the Integrated Terminal Weather System
Summary
Summary
The three major New York City (NYC) air carrier airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark) currently experience high delays due to adverse terminal weather, both in an absolute sense and relative to other major airport complexes. Significantly expanding the NYC airports (e.g., by adding new runways) to reduce delays is not feasible...
Performance characteristics of an algorithm used to remove anomolous propagation from the NEXRAD data
Summary
Summary
An important limitation of precipitation sensors is contamination from ground clutter targets under conditions of anomalous propagation (AP). This problem can be mitigated significantly by high-pass clutter filters such as used by the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) and Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) systems....MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT/LL) has developed...
Analysis of downstream impacts of air traffic delay
Summary
Summary
Reduction of air carrier flight delay in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) has been a major objective of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for many years. Much of the current delay arises from weather-induced delays at airports. When a plane is delayed on one of the day's flights, there...
Measuring the economic value of aviation meteorological products
Summary
Summary
The aviation system is one of the principal users of weather information. Assessing the benefits of weather information to aviation is important in a number of contexts: 1. Detemining the priority of investments in aviation weather information vis a vis other options for transportation and/or weather system investments, 2. Determinins...
Supporting the deployment of the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR)
Summary
Summary
The Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) program was initiated in the mid-1 980s to develop a reliable automated Doppler-radar-based system for detecting weather hazards in the airport terminal area and for providing warnings that will help pilots avoid these hazards when landing and departing. This article describes refinements made to...
The Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS)
Summary
Summary
The Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) is one of two major development projects sponsored by the FMs Aviation Weather Development Program. Focused on the environment within the airport terminal area, ITWS integrates data from FAA and National Weather Service (NWS) sensors and systems to provide a suite of weather informational...
ITWS and the NWS forecaster: what is the connection?
Summary
Summary
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is sponsoring the development of the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS), which is designed to acquire all of the weather data that is available in the terminal area, both ground-based and aircraft sensed, and to provide short-term (0 to 30-minute) predictions of microbursts, wind shear...