Echo Age in the National Radar Mosaic: An Update on the Statistics of Echo Age and Its Effects on Interpretation of Hazards in the Aviation Sector

In response to a 2012 NTSB safety bulletin highlighting the effects of echo age in radar mosaics on aviation safety, a new product has been introduced to the experimental Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system. This product is a time stamp mosaic that displays the actual age of echoes relative to the time the mosaic was produced. The time stamp mosaic is now running in real time across the entire three-dimensional MRMS mosaic. Information from the time stamp mosaic can be used for informed decision making such as 1) The frequency with which the national mosaic be updated, 2) Quantifying the uncertainty of marquee products used for aviation decision making, and 3) Communication of echo uncertainty to decision makers? These issues will be addressed along with a summary of statistics of typical latencies across the NAS for different flow regimes, locations, and times of year.