Aviation Weather Reporting Act

[GeeBee]

This is something I worked on in the late 90's and early 2000's. Utilizing ACARS and sensors aboard aircraft to deliver real time weather and turbulence data. Congressman Rich McCormick , a Marine Aviator has introduced a bill which would allow the NWS to gather this data and provide it to everyone rather than the airlines keeping it in house. This benefits all of us with better forecasting through more data points. The observations by inertial equipped aircraft for turbulence and GPS equipped aircraft for wind data will save a lot of money (no need to launch balloons) and give us all better data and forecasts.

https://www.docdroid.net/eVprOlH/aviation-weather-xml-final-pdf

[PeteMc]

This would be great!

[Pinecone]

Hmm, could maybe transmit the wind data using ADSB.

[EricJ]

This was done for a long time using TAMDAR, but I don't know what ever happened to that.   It's not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAMDAR

Edit:  A friend from grad school was AirDat's Chief Engineer for a long time and I recall one of their constant issues was getting the user funding to pay for the system.   I suspect what this bill tries to do is provide a formal source of funds to support it, or whatever it is that has replaced it or is used now.

 

 

[GeeBee]

What the bill does it not only provide money, but allows for wider distribution of data. With TAMDAR and other systems, the data was mostly housed in airline data bases. 

[EricJ]

53 minutes ago, GeeBee said:

What the bill does it not only provide money, but allows for wider distribution of data. With TAMDAR and other systems, the data was mostly housed in airline data bases. 

That was my understanding, and limited recollection, that it was offered to and available to agencies like NWS, but they did not have budget to pay for it.  It looks like this could change that.

[MattCW]

I'm new here, but been into weather for years. This would be amazing for forecasts! If the data can be ingested into the weather models, then forecast accuracy will skyrocket. Data from over the continent will certainly improve, but the place that will really show the greatest improvement is oceanic atmospheric data. We have buoys, satellites, and that's about it aside from the odd research plane. As someone who got his start in amateur weather chasing following hurricanes on The Weather Channel, the upper level winds where most of the data will be from, will provide a tremendous boost to tropical cyclone track forecasting. Though the bill is specifically for commercial aircraft, I wonder if the NWS would create a means to take in data from general aviation? Everything from bugsmashers showing off to friends at 2500ft, to the big jets taking the routes the airlines don't up in the flight levels. Including general aviation in the mix should improve the over-land vertical resolution, especially away from hub airports.

[Pinecone]

That is what we were saying.

Modern GPS systems give wind direction and speed.  ADSB can send data from aircraft.  Combined, most every aircraft in the sky can be sending real time wind data.

[GeeBee]

I got into this after blowing out my gastrocnemius muscle stepping off a curb in Charlotte. I was in rehab and living in an airline town a lot of the women in rehab with me were flight attendants. About half of them were rotator cuffs from overhead bins and the other half turbulence injuries. Most pilots don't realize it, but a turbulence injury that injures a flight attendant such that he/she has to sit down (can no longer perform duties) is an automatic NTSB 830 report. You're going to end up with a nice little report with your flight number or N-number on the front and your name as the PIC in it. Anyway I thought we could do better and with management's concurrence formed a working group to reduce injuries. What I found out was airlines "silo'd" their data. No one really shared out of fears of anti-trust issues. We tried to get the FAA on board but they seemed "disinterested".  The best at turbulence prediction at that time was Northwest. They were already taking data off their IRU accelerometers way before anybody else. The joke was, "always follow the red tail" if you wanted a smooth ride. Northwest was even willing to sell their system and their data and we made a business case based upon workmen's comp costs etc to management. We did not succeed.  Fast forward to 2010 and we finally got the data out of the silos and began sharing it but only across the industry. Winds and temps went to NWS but not much more. Equally so, the best data was coming from the North Atlantic because every airplane was IRU equipped and there was a profound amount of traffic. The freight dogs were the "pathfinders" as they often traversed the route on non-peak hours and their data set up the peak hours. As more short haul airplanes became IRU and collection equipped the domestic side improved. Compared to the 1990's turbulence injuries are down almost 50% which is a huge improvement. The Pacific remains a problem child because of the sharp temperature differences. There is enough traffic but getting precise areas nailed down due to the speed of weather and data latency remains a problem

[EricJ]

TAMDAR is apparently still the common data collection platform.   It's changed companies a couple of times over the years.

https://flyht.com/weather-sensors/tamdar/