Weather impacts and routing services in support of airspace management operations

Atmospheric impacts on platforms and alternative routing options which consider environmental factors along a planned path of movement are of high importance to military and civilian aviation operations. Such options serve to improve survivability and movement efficiency of aircraft and on-board systems. Environmental factors which may adversely affect systems during flight operations along a projected path include adverse weather and restricted airspace and/or airspace deconfliction issues. For military aviation operations, Threat activity, conflicting Friendly operations, and other obstacles are also considered. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory's (ARL's) Battlefield Environment Division is developing web services which generate grids of atmospheric impacts on military platforms as well as services which calculate optimized routes in 3D space which avoid adverse atmospheric conditions and other obstacles during mission execution. ARL's web services will supplement the Army's Tactical Airspace Integration System (TAIS) web service developments and incorporate TAIS airspace conflict detection services as input for route optimization. This paper describes ARL's My Weather Impacts Decision Aid (MyWIDA) services and Atmospheric Impact Routing (AIR) service, as well as collaboration efforts with the TAIS program.