As weather information services are crucial in supporting the safety, capacity and efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS), the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) weather architecture fulfills a crucial transformational role in improving NAS capabilities. Previous reports on aviation weather services (i.e., aviation industry, FAA, National Research Council, et al) indicate that approximately one-fourth of all aircraft accidents and one-third of fatal accidents were weather-related. Weather also continues to be a major factor adversely affecting NAS capacity, contributing to approximately 70% of system delays greater than 15 minutes. The FAA weather architecture must transition from the NAS of today to the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to mitigate the enormous impact of adverse weather. With the expectation that by 2025 capacity must accommodate a growth in air traffic three times that of today, mitigation of weather impacts becomes increasingly crucial. To mitigate these efficiency and capacity constraints while maintaining safety, aviation weather capabilities in the NAS must undergo major changes.

New sensors on the ground, airborne and on satellites will provide significantly improved detection of hazardous or impacting weather resulting in better weather advisories. Moreover, observational data from these sensors will be ingested by robust algorithms, then ‘fused' with other information to yield enhanced, tailored forecasts of operations-impacting weather enabling decision makers to adjust operations to significantly reduce weather impacts. Observations, weather forecasts, models, and climatology will be integrated to provide the single source of authoritative weather for any geographical location and altitude for NextGen tools. Additionally, weather information, including probabilistic forecasts, will be integrated into decision support systems of both FAA service providers and users further enhancing collaborative decision-making. For example, in traffic flow management tools, integrated probabilistic forecasts will incorporate both the uncertainty in weather forecasts and that of traffic demand to provide traffic managers with enhanced capacity forecasts that minimize the loss of usable airspace. Also, in NextGen all fully capable aircraft will have a standardized set of weather sensors/algorithms to provide weather information to other users directly and indirectly to others via the 4-D weather virtual database. Continued aviation weather research will resolve forecasting deficiencies such as a highly accurate, 8-hour convective forecast that is essential to support traffic management in the NextGen era. NextGen support requires transforming the current point-to-point communications to a net-centric weather capability to ensure all users receive weather information in real-time in a user context format. For the FAA, this net-centric capability is the System-Wide Information Management and its implementation will replace the current FAA weather dissemination systems/subsystems.

The FAA has developed a set of infrastructure and capability roadmaps that provide insight into the needed changes to the NAS enterprise architecture that are required to implement NextGen. In keeping with the NextGen theme of transformation while consolidating functionality [to reduce the number of systems and associated life cycle costs], the weather roadmap reflects this consolidation for both weather product generation and observing capabilities. One example is combining the functionality of WARP that must be sustained into the NextGen era with aviation forecast algorithms maturing out of aviation weather R&D in work package one (WP1) of the NextGen Weather Processor (NWP), a fully net-enabled system. To ensure new weather R&D capabilities are implemented in the shortest possible time, the NWP will be implemented in three work packages. In the second work package (WP2), the aviation weather capabilities required by system operations will be rehosted on this system and in the third work package (WP3) terminal capabilities will be added. At this time, the FAA does not assume that the converged aviation forecasting capabilities planned for implementation will be on a FAA system in the 2025 timeframe.

To ensure that future weather requirements are identified to support NextGen, the FAA will perform a functional analysis on the NextGen CONOPS 2.0 and the NextGen Weather CONOPS 1.0 to develop functional weather requirements. These requirements will be allocated to the agencies involved in NextGen while individual agencies, such as the FAA, will then develop their associated performance requirements. Once modeling and simulations with service providers (e.g., traffic flow management specialists) and users has been accomplished, the complete set of agency weather performance requirements will be finalized and allocated to specific systems within each agency. The allocation of FAA weather performance requirements will result in an updated weather infrastructure roadmap. The challenge for the FAA is to employ system engineering ‘best practices' that are critical for transforming NAS capabilities into NextGen in a timely and cost effective manner.