Bad Weather Highlighting: Advanced Visualization of Severe Weather and Support in Air Traffic Control Displays

Adverse weather conditions can have major impacts on air traffic and its control (ATC) in terms of safety and capacity. However, today's ATC situation data displays hardly contain any weather information. Controllers only manually react on external forecasts or status reports to re-plan the aircraft flight paths. The project “Meteorology for Air Traffic Management” (MET4ATM) uses nowcast and forecast weather data for aircraft re-routing calculations and visualization of weather in the radar display. If our Arrival Manager (AMAN) detects that a planned four-dimensional aircraft trajectory is affected by severe weather, it will consider the respective weather polygon, severity, moving direction, and extension for an aircraft re-routing via a detour point. However, the weather situational awareness of the controller would still not be given without further information on the radar display. Therefore, we describe advanced visualization techniques, i.e. a morphing algorithm, to let nowcast polygons become forecast polygons over time until the next weather data update appears. Our implemented prototype highlights weather and re-route affected aircraft, presents smoothly moving weather polygons on the radar display, and gives concrete 4D-trajectory based advisories for re-routing taking the complete arrival stream into account. This continuous support will help controllers to optimize high dynamic air traffic flow even if aircraft do not completely follow the automatically generated plan. In this way the whole severe weather approach operations remain supported by the controller assistance systems and therefore within standard processes.