Innovative Integration of Severe Weather Forecasts into an Extended Arrival Manager

Abstract

In the H2020 project “Satellite-borne and INsitu Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM” (SINOPTICA), an air traffic controller support system was extended to organize approaching traffic even under severe weather conditions. During project runtime, traffic days with extreme weather events in the Po Valley were analyzed, an arrival manager was extended with a module for 4D diversion trajectory calculation, two display variants for severe weather conditions in an air traffic controller primary display were developed, and the airport Milano Malpensa was modelled for an air traffic simulation. On the meteorological side, three new forecasting techniques were developed to better nowcast weather events affecting tactical air traffic operations and used to automatically organize arrival traffic. Additionally, short-range weather forecasts with high spatial resolution were elaborated using radar-based nowcasting and a numerical weather prediction model with data assimilation. This nowcast information was integrated into the extended arrival manager for the sequencing and guiding of approaching aircraft even in adverse weather situations. The combination of fast and reliable weather nowcasts with a guidance support system enables severe weather diversion coordination in combination with a visualization of its dynamics on traffic situation displays.

Application of Severe Weather Nowcasting to Case Studies in Air Traffic Management

“…The developed algorithm perfectly adapts to these needs by providing nowcasting information ready to integrate into an AMAN shortly after receiving the last radar image, and the possibility of synthetic visualization of approaching storms on the air traffic control display monitor. The different possibilities of visualization and a preliminary opinion assessment by the air traffic controllers themselves is discussed in [24].…”

“…The objective of this study was to develop a decision support tool that can be operational in ATC to assist pilots in their approach to an airport while avoiding areas of convective hazard. To achieve this, the nowcasting algorithm aims to anticipate regions where intense storms may occur in order to provide alternative routes through an extended Arrival Manager (AMAN) [24]. First, the system must determine the presence or absence of storms near the airport (within a radius of 150 nautical miles, approx.…”

“…For the integration of nowcasting into software for ATM, we defined three different time windows, one for each case study. This allowed us to evaluate how the ATM software reacts when ingesting slightly different predictions from the same phenomena obtained with different nowcasting methods [24]. For these time windows, RaNDeVIL was applied and the outputs (forecasted areas) were selected according to the criteria followed in the SINOPTICA project.…”

“…Timely consideration of weather impacts de-complexifies the incoming traffic, reduces air traffic controller workload, and consequently increases safety. An extended AMAN allows ATC to calculate the arrival sequence and the corresponding arrival times well in advance with routing advisories depending on the predicted convection behavior [24]. This sequencing software runs in real time and needs weather information for up to 30 min ahead of the current time.…”