Weather and air traffic, together: INtegrated Support for Impacted air-Traffic Environments (INSITE)

INSITE is an interactive web-based tool (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/fiqas/tech/impact/insite/ , best viewed in firefox) that provides information on potential airspace impacts derived from forecast convective weather products combined with air traffic data. INSITE relies on a large backend processing system to produce, in near real-time, constraint information derived from multiple forecast products. Intermediate constraint data and geographical images are stored in a file-based system to support user queries.

As part of the backend processing, INSITE ingests the multiple convective weather products and converts each of them to potential airspace constraints by blending them with traffic information. The technique to convert the raw forecast data is known as the Flow Constraint Index (FCI). The weather-based constraint is weighted by traffic density to produce the final FCI output. The FCI is computed on an airway-based geometry defined by 40x80 nm segments, and then summarized geographically and temporally to support visualization of constraints.

The Flow Constraint Index (FCI) algorithm for the translation component is written in Java and is applied to raw forecasts and air traffic data to derive the constraint field. Storage of intermediate information uses a combination of a MySQL database and netCDF files. Process control and image generation are written in Python. The User Interface (UI) was developed in Python using the Sencha development toolkit, and is deployed to an Apache websever using Django Web framework.