Recent Enhancements and Plans for the Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS)

This presentation will demonstrate (via the Internet) recent enhancements to the Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) and describe plans for future work. A key recent enhancement is the ADDS Flight Path Tool (FPT) that enables users to generate interactively for user-specified flight routes time-sequenced vertical and horizontal graphical cross-sections of forecasts of key atmospheric variables (e.g., wind, icing, and turbulence) and observations (e.g., PIREPs and METARs). The challenge in developing the FPT was to enable ADDS to generate the cross-sections very quickly from gridded data generated by the Rapid Update Cycle and algorithms.

Other recent enhancements include: 1) improving the utility of the JAVA-based PIREP and METAR viewers; 2) improving the performance (i.e., ability to respond to user requests in a timely manner) of the METAR viewer by incorporating progressive disclosure; 3) expanding the domain of ADDS to include the Northern Hemisphere; 4) enabling ADDS to display NEXRAD observations at frequent intervals; and 5) transferring ADDS to the NWS Aviation Weather Center (AWC). The last enhancement includes enabling ADDS to access all its data from AWC and developing software that monitors the "health" of ADDS and alerts AWC support staff as necessary.

An important activity for the coming year entails implementing ADDS in an Automated Flight Service Station (AFSS) and conducting a study of the utility of using ADDS as a interactive component of flight briefings. Planned enhancements to ADDS include enabling ADDS to: monitor observations and forecasts for user-specified conditions and alerting users when those conditions are met; and 2) display automated turbulence reports (pending airline approval), VORs, and Airways.

ADDS is being developed by the NCAR Research Applications Program (RAP), NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), and NWS Aviation Weather Center (AWC) under the auspices of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Product Development Team for the Aviation Gridded Forecast System (AGFS). Funding is provided by the FAA Aviation Weather Research (AWR) Program.