Weather Information Services for Enterprise Research—A Framework to Allow Better Integration, Analysis, and Testing of Weather Information within the National Airspace System

Weather data is critical to many air traffic systems within the FAA’s National Airspace System (NAS) and is a key contributor to both air traffic tactical decision making and strategic planning. Many activities essential to developing and introducing a new weather or air traffic capability into the NAS require the use of archived weather data. Historical aviation weather data sets are often an essential component of research, simulation, modeling, testing and other activities.

Acquiring and managing weather data sets is time consuming and expensive. Further, a certain level of expertise is required to understand what data to collect, its source and structure, and how to interpret weather data content, as well as determine the specific weather data elements appropriate for an application. The need for readily accessible and computable weather data is growing. Researchers require faster access to weather and flight data sets than what is currently available today to explore and develop solutions for reducing weather’s impact on the NAS.

Most programs have limited weather expertise and opt to individually acquire and manger their own weather data sets, as well as build their own tools for integration and analysis. These activities tend to be repetitive with significant overlap in effort between programs. Additionally, many programs have little knowledge of how weather data is integrated and used by other systems. All of this has a negative impact to program costs and schedules.

The FAA’s Aviation Weather Branch is developing a framework called Weather Information Services for Enterprise Research (WISER) in order to mitigate the cost and schedule impacts as well as expand programs access to expert knowledge of weather in the NAS. The main goals of WISER are to provide easier access to archived weather data; the ability to integrate archived weather and NAS data sets and perform some type of analysis; help programs explore new concepts, better understand and resolve technical and operational issues, and address gaps in the NAS. Built upon a flexible microservice architecture, WISER aims to accomplish this in three ways. First, WISER will deliver an enterprise level solution for collecting, archiving and organizing NAS-relevant weather data. Second, it will provide services to integrate and perform analysis of archived weather and other NAS data sets, as well as visualize the combined datasets in a geospatial 3D animated viewer. Finally, it will provide the capability to synchronously replay archived weather data sets back to one or more laboratory systems for testing or other research activities.

The vision for WISER is a shared resource (i.e., data, processes and services) accessible by many programs and projects. The goal is to bring together Meteorology, Aviation, and Computer Science while also bringing research closer to the users of the NAS. WISER will provide the capability to more easily prototype the latest research, study its effectiveness in an operational-like setting, and benefit from more frequent input from the users.