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 can be a carryover delay that affects later flights by that aircraft. In this report, we develo...

■ 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 by radar is challenging because it requ...

There is a critical need for improved departure management during convective weather events in the highly congested airspace in the Northeast and upper Midwest. An early study (Allan, 2001) of the New York Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) prototype suggested that small increases in New York airport departure rates during Severe Weather Avoidance Programs (SWAP) could result in signific...

En route airspace congestion, often due to convective weather, causes system-wide delays and disruption in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). Present-day methods for managing congestion are mostly manual, based on uncertain forecasts of weather and traffic demand, and often involve rerouting or delaying entire flows of aircraft. A sequential decision-making approach is proposed, in which ...

speeds in each lane. PORTAL also includes incident and variable message sign (VMS) data since 1999, 1 year’s worth of stop level bus data and hourly and daily weather conditions in Portland from automated weather stations. The four weather measures are temperature, visibility, wind speed, and rainfall. From the basic sensor data PORTAL computes four other measures using road segment length: veh...

As air traffic grows significantly, aircraft accidents increase. Many aviation accidents could be prevented if the precise aircraft positions and weather conditions on the aircraft’s route were known. Existing studies propose determining the precise aircraft positions via a VHF channel with an air-to-air radio relay system that is based on mobile ad-hoc networks. However, due to the long propag...

Benefits quantification and NAS performance assessment have become very important topics for the aviation weather community. In an era of significant federal government and airline budget austerity for civil aviation investments, it is essential to quantitatively demonstrate delay reduction benefits of improved weather decision support systems. Major FAA initiatives stress the importance of qua...

This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. Thunderstorms are a leading cause of delay in the National Airspace System (NAS), and significant research has been conducted to predict the areas pilo...