The three major New York City (NYC) air carrier airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) currently experience high delays due to adverse terminal weather, both in an absolute sense and relative to other major airport complexes. Significantly expanding the NYC airports (e.g., by adding new runways) to reduce delays is not feasible. An alternative approach to improving the adverse weather terminal capacity is to provide aviation weather decision support systems to air traffic, airline, and airport operations personnel to help them operate more safely and effectively with the existing runway/taxiway complexes.
Under an innovative partnership between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the FAA, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has installed and is currently operating a functional prototype Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) to conduct research on improving the safety and efficiency of operations at the NYC airports. The New York terminal area provides a stringent test of the ITWS ability to safely reduce delays due to both the meteorology and the operational usage challenges not found at the earlier ITWS test locations of Orlando, Memphis, and Dallas.
New meteorological challenges include estimating the highly sheared wind environment during coastal storms with poorly situated Doppler radars and handling sea breeze effects on both gust front and line storm dynamics. New operational usage factors include significant traffic from three enroute centers feeding directly into a single TRACON, coordination of runway changes at interacting airports, complex arrival/departure transition areas for the TRACON, and the nonlinear delay effects that arise at airports that frequently have demands greater than the effective capacity.
The New York ITWS commenced operational usage in August 1998. Product displays are located in the New York TRACON, all four major New York City airport towers (JFK, LGA, EWR, and TET), three enroute centers (New York, Washington, and Boston) and at the FAA Command Center (Reston, VA). The seven radar sensors integrated by the NY ITWS extend from Philadelphia, PA, to White Plains, NY, to the eastern portion of Long Island. In this paper, we describe the initial experience with the NY ITWS in addressing the meteorological and operational usage challenges of the New York terminal area.
1 This work was sponsored by the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey under a Cooperative Research and Development
Agreement (CRDA) with M.I.T. Lincoln Laboratory. The views expressed are
those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position
of the Port Authority
The 8th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology