A multiscale turbulence prediction and alert system for airports in hilly regions

The paper describes a multiscale turbulence prediction and alert system for airports in hilly regions. The system has been approved by the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and has been fully operational since 1st July 2009. The article starts with a brief theoretical description of the system developed and implemented at 20 Norwegian airports located in hilly regions. The brief description is followed by a quantitative description of the computational cost and robustness of the model. In the following section, results from the numerical model is compared against synoptic data obtained from airports and Flight Data Recorder (FDR) of some aircraft. Finally, a strategy to communicate the predictions of the system to the Air Traffic Management in real time is explained.