Assessment of the 60 km rapid update cycle (RUC) with near real-time aircraft reports. Project report

Abstract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is developing the Center-TRA-CON Advisory System (CTAS), a set of Air Traffic Management (ATM) Decision Support Tools (DST) for en route (Center) and terminal (TRACON) airspace designed to enable controllers to increase capacity and flight efficiency. A crucial component of the CTAS, or any ATM DST, is the computation of the time-of-flight of aircraft along flight path segments. Earlier NASA studies show that accurate knowledge of the wind through which the aircraft are flying is required to estimate time-of-flight accurately. There are current envisioned to be two sources of wind data for CTAS: The Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) for the Center airspace, a numerical model developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Forecast System Laboratory (FSL) and run operationally by the National Weather Service (NWS) National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP); and The Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) Terminal Winds (TW) for the TRACON airspace, developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory under funding from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This study has three goals: (1) determine the errors in the baseline 60 km resolution RUC forecast wind fields relative to the needs of en route DSTs such as CTAS, (2) determine themore » benefit of using the TW algorithm to refine the RUC forecast wind fields with near real-time Meteorological Data Collection and Reporting System (MDCRS) reports, and (3) identify factors that influence wind errors in order to improve accuracy and estimate errors in real time.« less