SystemsAWE: aviation weather data visualization environment
Introduction
Weather is one of the major causes of aviation accidents. According to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) planning group, it is estimated that approximately 30% of commercial aircraft accidents have weather as a contributing factor. Although, the percentage of accidents (0.4 accidents per 100,000 departures) has remained flat in the past five years according to the National Transportation Safety Board, the total number of accidents will increase beyond public expectations due to the projected increase in the number of flights in a few years. Therefore, in 1997, a national goal was defined in the United States to reduce the fatal aviation accident rate by 80% by the year 2007. The US Federal Aviation Administration has launched an aggressive aviation weather research program and is pouring millions of dollars into different parts of the aviation weather research [1].
Significant advances have been made in the last decade in both weather forecasting and weather visualization for a variety of audiences including scientists, forecasters and the general public [2]. Professional TV production systems for weather presentations to the general public have been in existence for more than ten years and are constantly being upgraded. An example is the TriVis system operating since 1993 [3]. An interactive 3D weather visualization system VISUAL for scientists has been installed in the German Meteorological Office (DWD) in collaboration with Fraunhofer IGD since mid-1990s. Personalized weather-on-demand products are also being offered through the internet since 1998. Augmented reality weather visualization systems are being developed. Many of these systems also incorporate numerical weather prediction (NWP) forecasts and observations. However, the users are requesting tailored visualization tools for their specific needs. In particular, the existing and developing weather forecasting and visualization technology needs to be harnessed appropriately for the benefit of pilots.
Broadly speaking, all aviation activities can be classified into commercial airline operations, general aviations (GA) and military operations. It is important to understand the differences between the needs of weather visualization and route selection for commercial and general aviation pilots. It is interesting to note that only 4% of aircraft are associated with commercial airline operations. Indeed, the rest of the aviation activities, referred to as general aviation, account for 96% of all aircraft. General aviation aircraft range from single-seat, single-engine, piston aircraft to business jets that can fly as high as air carriers but typically carry less than 20 passengers. More importantly, GA pilots cover the full spectrum of flying experience, from student pilots with of experience to accomplished pilots with tens of thousands of hours. In contrast, commercial pilots have substantial flying experience, fly powerful equipment such as the Boeing 747, and have a network of support people on the ground at the Airline Operations Center and the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) air traffic control centers. In addition, GA pilots often fly at lower altitudes, fly slower, carry less fuel on board, and thus cover shorter distances in a single flight. A typical flight covers about in . Because of the lower altitude and slower speed, they spend more time in adverse weather conditions. In contrast, air carrier aircraft are able to fly above much of the weather for a large portion of the flight. Commercial air carriers account for 85% of all the passengers carried, 67% of the total miles flown, but only 40% of the total hours flown due to the high speed. Indeed, although GA accounts for only 60% of the total hours flown, it accounts for over 92% of the total accidents. The fatal accident rate for air carriers is 0.15 accidents per 100,000 h flown, whereas it is nearly an order of magnitude greater for GA at 1.4 accidents per 100,000 h flown. Of these accidents, more than 15% can be attributed to weather [4].
Whereas other researchers are focusing on improving meteorological forecasting techniques, the focus of our work is to provide weather graphics to help GA pilots more easily and quickly visualize the big picture. The most important official source of aviation weather reports for GA pilots in the United States is Direct User Access Terminals (DUATs) [5]. In addition, weather briefings can be obtained via telephone, aircraft radio, or infrequently, in person from Flight Service Station (FSS) specialists (employees of the FAA) [6], [7], [8]. Most of these briefings are textual or verbal and are obtained prior to flight. Face-to-face briefings with an FSS specialist have the advantage of access to graphical displays of the data. This advantage is outweighed by the limited availability of FSS facilities. DUATs, available via the world wide web or dial-up, recently began offering some weather graphics to help pilots visualize the textual data. Unfortunately, DUATs does not provide visualization of three of the most important elements of a weather briefing: airport-specific current weather observations (meteorological observations, or METARs), terminal area forecasts (TAFs), and winds aloft forecasts.
In a recent article [1], Perry states that “Unfortunately, the type of weather information available to a commercial pilot is scanty; a sheet of weather data printed out before takeoff, may be outdated and of minimal use”. The inadequacy of the weather information provided to pilots through DUATs often makes them turn to several other unofficial sources of weather information such as the television news weather reports, the Weather Channel [9], or a variety of free and commercial weather web sites [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. Perhaps, the most important unofficial source of weather information to pilots is the National Weather Service (NWS) web sites [10]. Although these web sites provide a greater variety of weather graphics, the information provided to the pilots associated with airports and terminal areas is difficult to use. The pilot has to pick an airport in order to display the weather-specific information, which is then displayed textually without filtering as shown in Fig. 1, which is difficult to grasp. Moreover, this weather information is hard to relate to the flight's schedule and path.
In this paper, we present Aviation Weather Data Visualization Environment (AWE) that focuses on extracting aviation-specific weather information from textual documents, visualizing this information, linking it to the flight's path and schedule, and providing a simple user interface to the pilot to control the display. To this purpose, we focus specifically on those weather elements that have not been visualized or are not readily accessible through DUATs or the unofficial sources mentioned previously. Three main examples of these products are: airport-specific current weather observations (meteorological observations, or METARs), TAFs, and winds aloft forecasts. AWE provides linking of this information to the flight's path and schedule, and thus facilitates answering of questions tailored to the pilot's needs which are difficult to address using current weather products. For example, AWE can be used to answer the following question quickly: will the clouds be low enough to require flight under instrument flight rules, or can I fly under visual flight rules?
It is possible to extend AWE by adding additional weather-related information such as the information on turbulence, wake vortices, icing, lightning and precipitation information, storm cells, ceiling, etc., or by adding numerous continuous weather informations based on numerical weather prediction systems. Later in Section 4, we report on some preliminary pilots’ feedback on these questions. However, clearly additional research is needed to decide how much additional weather information (and which ones) can be presented in a display so that the visualization remains intuitive and uncluttered. Such a study is beyond the scope of this work. Rather, AWE is one step towards the important goal of “providing weather information relative to the pilot's flight path, present it to the pilot in the cockpit in an easy-to-interpret graphical format, and give him decision-making aids to help him use that information…” outlined by Stough, the manager of NASA's aviation weather information systems (AWIN) project at the Langley Research Center [1].
There is one additional very important question: the availability of in-flight weather information to the pilots. The most important issue here is the communication of the information to the pilots and the advancement in the datalink technologies. In this area again, currently the commercial pilot gets updates from the ground staff through a text printer via 2400 baud modem, or hears anecdotal reports from other pilots in the area. Currently, AWE is operational on the ground as a briefing and routing tool for pilots prior to flight. Because of the minimal data transfer requirements, AWE can be easily incorporated as an in-flight decision-making tool.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we fully describe DUATs, some of the unofficial weather sources, and related work. In Section 3, we present AWE including graphical design, display and flight path planning issues. In Section 4, we describe users’ feedback and experiences. Finally, in Section 5, we conclude with a summary and directions for future research.
Section snippets
Background and previous work
We begin by describing in detail the most important source of official weather information available to pilots—DUATs. We then describe some useful but unofficial sources of weather information. Specifically, we discuss some of the commercial weather data visualization systems as well as another government system—Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) from the NWS. We conclude this section with a discussion of related weather and aviation visualization research.
AWE
In this section, we present AWE. The input to the AWE prototype is a DUATs briefing for a specific area, for example, a 95 nautical mile (nm) radius from the Palo Alto airport, KPAO. We map this briefing onto a grid specific to the pilot's route or his area of interest and only include information relevant to his flight. For instance, for route-specific weather, rather than displaying current data available for his destination, we use forecasts available for his proposed time of arrival
Users’ feedback and experiences
The first author of this paper is a general aviation pilot herself with a commercial license with instrument rating and over of flight experience. During the design of AWE, feedback was taken on many issues discussed below at several stages from different pilots to ensure that the system remains pilot-friendly and usable.
AWE, as discussed in this work, was also evaluated by six general aviation pilots (five of them work at NASA Ames Research Center, California). Four of the pilots have a
Conclusions and future work
We have presented an Aviation Weather Data Visualization Environment (AWE) for General Aviation (GA) pilots. The system was designed keeping the needs of the pilots in mind. The focus is to display winds aloft, METARs and TAFs information against a useful background in an integrated manner to assist the pilots in making useful decisions. The system can be used for pre-flight weather briefings, route selection, to make a “go/no-go” decision prior to the flight, and to select alternate
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the suggestions from fellow pilots David Iverson, Cedric Walker, and Butler Hine, as well as the anonymous reviewers. This research was partially supported by LLNL Agreement No. B347879 under DOE Contract No. W-7405-ENG-48 and the Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI) grant by DOD.
References (51)
- et al.
Meterology meets computer graphics—a look at a wide range of weather visulations for diverse audiences
Computers and Graphics
(2000) Tracking weather's flight path
IEEE Spectrum
(2000)- Schroder F, Lux M, Trivis: Professional television weather presentation. World Wide Web, October 1997....
- AOPA. Aviation Fact Card,...
- DynCorp DUATS. World Wide Web....
- U.S. Department of Transportation. Aviation weather: AC 00-6A. US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC,...
- U.S. Department of Transportation. Aviation weather services: AC 00-45C. US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC,...
- Uckun S, Ruokangas C, Donohue P, Tuvi S. Aware: Technologies for interpreting and presenting aviation weather...
- The Weather Channel. World Wide Web....
- NOAA National Weather Service. World Wide Web....
Weather without the weatherman
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Visualizing large data sets in the earth sciences
IEEE Computer
Visualizing oceanographic data
IEEE Computers Graphics and Applications
Visualization of scattered meteorological data
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Visualization for climate modeling
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Visualizing environmental data at the epa
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Graphics and environmental decision making
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Cited by (19)
A visualization and optimization of the impact of a severe weather disruption to an air transportation network
2022, Computers and Industrial EngineeringCitation Excerpt :The authors use various statistical methods to organize time-dependent data. Some authors use basic data mining techniques (Baker et al., 1995), pattern identification (Benger et al., 2006; Venkataraman et al., 2006; Yang, 2016), grid mapping (Spirkovska et al., 2002) classification (Sisneros, Huang, Ostrouchov, Ahern, & Semeraro, 2013; Wu et al., 2018; Olshannikova et al., 2015), binned aggregation (Yang, 2016), and vertex weighting (Singh, Zhao, Chen, & Zhang, 2005). They also analyze the data using standard statistical techniques such as frequency distributions (Trautman, 2011), density mapping (Klein et al., 2014), linear regression (Dey, Phillips, & Steele, 2012).
Effects of Probabilistic Risk Situation Awareness Tool (RSAT) on Aeronautical Weather-Hazard Decision Making
2020, Frontiers in PsychologyCivil Aviation Occurrences in Indonesia
2020, Journal of Advanced TransportationComparative analysis of flight search representations
2019, Journal of Organizational and End User ComputingAHP-Entropy based priority assessment of factors to reduce aviation fuel consumption
2019, International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and ManagementTurbulence ahead - A 3D web-based aviation weather visualizer
2018, UIST 2018 - Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology