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Assessment of Aviation Delay Reduction Benefits for Nowcasts and Short Term Forecasts James Evans and Mike Robinson Weat

Assessment of Aviation Delay Reduction Benefits for Nowcasts and Short Term Forecasts James Evans and Mike Robinson Weather Sensing Group MIT Lincoln Laboratory . Outline. Motivation

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Assessment of Aviation Delay Reduction Benefits for Nowcasts and Short Term Forecasts James Evans and Mike Robinson Weat

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  1. Assessment of Aviation Delay Reduction Benefits for Nowcasts and Short Term Forecasts James Evans and Mike Robinson Weather Sensing Group MIT Lincoln Laboratory

  2. Outline • Motivation • Quantification of user benefits for nowcasts and short term forecasts is increasingly important in time of government austerity and increased commercial applications • Aviation is a particularly important application since it has key elements needed for practical use of these forecasts Real time communications Ability to react to weather Users can be trained Urgent current need • Causality of delays • Key elements of nowcast/short term forecast usage • Assessing delay reduction for a contemporary system • Suggestions for nowcast/short term forecast developers

  3. What is Generating the US Delays: NAS Network Constraints Paradigm A: Insufficient adverse weather capacity at airports Paradigm B: Convective storms impact the network by reducing the capacity of jet routes, en route sectors and terminals. Bad delay days invariably involve en route and terminal demand > effective capacity… ability to reroute is a key factor in delay magnitude Assessing benefits by comparing delays is very difficult due to differences in weather severity and demand 2 4 1 5 Airport 3

  4. CIWS Benefits Approach User Facilities Visited in 2003 ZBW ZAU ZOB ZNY C90 N90 ARTCC ZID ZDC TRACON SCC FedEx Airline ATCSCC Detailed Case Study Modeling Multi-day “Blitz” observations of product usage Observations during “Blitz” Events Cases identified in Daily feedback # of improved ‘Annualized’ CIWS Delay Reduction Benefits ATC decisions Average Benefit Individual Delay Savings Events Frequency of convective weather at various ATC facilities (for each ATC decision)

  5. Coordination for Decisions Davison and Hansman, ATC Quarterly 2002

  6. Unquantifiable with 2003 Assessment Approach 3314 3500 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 Quantifiable Benefit Annual benefit 28,383 hours delay reduction ($108.7 M) 3. Estimate of Annual Benefit Occurrences Annual benefit 11,702 hours delay reduction ($43.8 M) 1289 6. 953 756 749 439 311 276 196 194 183 157 110 69 52 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 • Situational awareness • Inter facility coordination • Routes open longer • Improved Arrival Transition • Area (ATA) management • Reduce workload • Proactive reroutes • Directing pathfinders • More SWAP departures • Shorter/fewer ground steps • Directing traffic through gaps • Improved safety • Close route proactively • Optimize runway usage • Avoid ground stop • Reduced MIT restrictions • Improved use of Ground Delay • Program (GDP) CIWS Domain Delay Benefits in 2003

  7. The Weather Delay Statistics Challenge Although many nowcasts/short term forecasts have been introduced since 1998, reducing delays has been difficult due to other changes in the NAS

  8. Benefits Assessment Suggestions • Use intensive user facility observations during adverse weather before forecast deployment to better understand the user decision “system” and, establish baseline • May need to modify forecast content to address key user issues • Intensive user facility observations after forecast deployment plus detailed analysis to • Obtain initial quantitative results, and • focus aviation delay statistical analysis • Look in detail at flight tracks and wide area sensor (e.g., weather radar) data as opposed to relying only on surface observation reports (METARs) to characterize convective weather impacts • Be prepared to acquire an in depth understanding of the operations of the aviation system if you must carry out delay (and, possibly safety) analyses

  9. Summary • Weather continues to dominate overall US delays and, convective weather causes large unexpected delays that are particularly disruptive to the system customers • Policy changes make it critical to assess whether the aviation system is managing weather impacts better • Assessment of performance is challenging • Convective weather events are not repeatable • Many other factors (traffic management system, procedures, and/or demand) impact delay • User feedback plus detailed observations and data analysis have shown very high benefits for nowcasts and short term forecasts • Development of reliable delay statistics based approaches will be a topic of research for a number of years

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