Volpe Center Highlights - February 2000
Economic Growth and Trade
Director's Notes |
Focus |
Safety |
Mobility |
Human and Natural Environment |
Economic Growth and Trade |
National Security
Advance America's economic growth and competitiveness domestically and internationally through efficient and flexible transportation.
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Volpe Enhances Weather Information in FAA Traffic Management System (FAA)
Recently, the Volpe Center enhanced the weather information available through the Traffic Management System (TMS), which is the real-time computer system that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses to predict, detect, and handle air traffic congestion problems. Weather images from the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) now are available through the private TMS Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) Program Web site. The CDM Program is the FAA's high priority initiative to provide improved operational service through sharing of information between the airlines and the FAA's air traffic organization. The Volpe Center's CDM Program Web site is only accessible to CDM participants who are connected to CDMnet. CDMnet is the umbrella term used to describe a collection of private intranets that are connected to each other at the CDMnet hub site located at the Volpe Center. CDMnet participants include most of the major domestic airlines, the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC), the National Weather Service's Aviation Weather Center (AWC), Lincoln Laboratory, and some aviation products vendors.
ITWS, which combines data from a number of sensors into an integrated picture of the weather situation surrounding an airport, is the state-of-the-art system for accurately depicting convective weather (e.g., storms, lightning, etc.). The Volpe Center obtains the ITWS data from Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lincoln Laboratory provides the Volpe Center with ITWS images from New York City, Dallas, Memphis, and Orlando, the four sites where the system currently is deployed. In addition, the Center also started providing images from the Terminal Convective Weather Forecasting Product, which uses ITWS data to predict convective weather up to an hour in advance. The availability of the enhanced weather information means that air carriers now will be able to use these products in their flight planning and that the FAA now will be better equipped to manage the nation's air traffic.
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