Improving safety and the capacity of the National Airspace System (NAS) during periods of adverse weather has become increasingly important in recent years. This need is expected to become more acute given the rapid growth in NAS operations anticipated between now and the year 2005. A key element in delivering these major improvements will be providing the Air Traffic users with specially designed weather products that effectively facilitate their traffic management decision making. Reaching this goal is particularly important for the major terminals and surrounding en route airspace since the bulk of delays and traffic are associated with these facilities.
This paper describes key features of the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) situation display (SD), which will be a principal decision support tool (DST) for air traffic management (ATM) at major terminal areas in the U.S. The ITWS user population consists of busy users who are not meteorologists, but who briefly and intermittently use the display to reach decisions on ATM (as opposed to a full time user with substantial meteorological background as typified by the CWSU meteorologists. ITWS provides the capability to:
1. Monitor both wide regions (e.g., terminal areas as large as 300 km by 250 km) and very small areas (e.g., immediately around a runway) simultaneously,
2. Capture insights regarding rapidly evolving adverse weather phenomena with enough lead-time to implement the desired decisions,
3. Integrate a wide variety of information on a single display to form a coherent picture of the weather, and
4. Operate in environments where there is limited space for displays.
Some of the key features of the ITWS SD that will be discussed include:
1. Multiple window displays with a computer human interface (CHI) that is similar to existing FAA ATM decision support tools,
2. Warning panels for key meteorological events designed to alert an ITWS user, who is not physically close to the display, of a situation requiring more detailed examination of the information,
3. Interactive features (e.g., pop up windows at storm locations) that provide additional decision support tools beyond the graphical weather depictions, and
4. The ability to manipulate the display of information on storms and gust fronts to minimize the display clutter and to otherwise customize the display to suit the user and the environment.
The design of the ITWS SD, which will be part of the production ITWS system when it is deployed, has had the benefit of considerable input from operational users who were exposed to ITWS prototypes from 1993 to the present. The results of these efforts will be reflected in a new prototype SD, which will first be used as part of the New York ITWS functional prototype in mid August 1998. We will describe initial reaction to this new FAA aviation weather decision support tool in the conclusions of the paper.
* This work was sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government.
+ Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations
are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United
States Air Force