Fair Weather Friend

Fair Weather Friend
Travel delays are frustrating, not to mention costly. It seems ironic that for all the technological advances throughout the airline industry, planes can still be grounded for hours whilst a storm passes, or last minute maintenance is carried out. While repairs will always have to occur, at last an improved weather forecasting system is on offer saving time and money for airlines and travellers alike.

The system, developed by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been tested at four New York- area airports. It saved the industry more than $150 million last year by reducing delays by 49,000 hours. The Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) provides accurate, easy to use storm and wind forecasts that allows aircraft controllers to make better decisions.

The new system helped reduce delays by providing accurate predictions of storm movements so that planes could safely land and take-off during gaps in disturbances. The information on high altitude also enabled controllers to land more aircraft per hour when coastal storms were present.

The breakthrough is timely, as figures show that the number of flight delays in the US rose by 20 per cent from 1999 to 2000. Nearly 70 per cent of these delays were due to bad weather. A previous solution to airport delays has been to build more runways, thus expanding capacity. This is not feasible at the New York airports, so increasing bad weather capabilities makes the ITWS all the more attractive.

Air-traffic tactics
Effective air traffic management during troublesome weather in the area surrounding an airport requires co-ordination between airport towers, Terminal Radar Approach Control rooms, and en-route centres to enable controllers to make decisions affecting air-traffic routing, runway usage, and ground delay programs.

The ITWS screencombines all this with many windows, all with different information, according to what the controller needs to know. Coloured panels at the top of the screen are designed to alert the user to weather events that may affect the controller's decision making, and thus call for closer scrutiny on another page. Special alert information is visible at a distance of three metres or more from the screen.

It works by combining data from radar sources, sensor equipped planes, a national lightning sensor and a multitude of other systems reporting surface winds and temperatures. By combining these, the ITWS can reliably locate storms to within 1 kilometre and provide minute by minute updates. The system's wind speed data helps controllers judge the amount of time it will take an aircraft to land.

Seamless system
"There's a lot out there, and the key thing we do its grab it all, combine it and translate it into a form that can be used easily. That's where MIT technology comes in. We don't want to show raw data on screen. We want to take the information, update it continually and display it seamlessly," says MIT senior staff researcher James. E. Evans.

The ITWS screen depicts a weather system superimposed over a map like television forecasters use. The storm itself looks like a colourful swirl on the screen, with highlighted areas indicating rain or wind. Blue lines show where the storm will be in the next 10-20 minutes. Yellow areas show where the line of storm will be in 30 to 60 minutes.

An overview of the area can show a radius of more than 160 kilometres, Controllers can also zoom down to a zone as small as a city block if they want to check a specific region or runway. They can also establish the presence of lightning or hail in any given region.

The system is a seamless, continually updated service, which includes information on microbursts, which are sudden violent down drafts of air, that are especially dangerous to aeroplanes during take a take-off or when landing.

The is expected to be widely available throughout American airports within two years, so expect more delays until then.

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