2. Taiwan - Advanced Operational Aviation Weather System (AOAWS)

The Advanced Operational Aviation Weather System (AOAWS) is a 6-year aviation weather system modernization program (1997-2003), sponsored by the Taiwan Civil Aeronautics Administration. The Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) commissioned NCAR to design, build and implement the AOAWS in Taiwan as a technology transfer program between the U.S. Government and Taiwan. NCAR/RAP is leading the program and other participants include NCAR/MMM, and the Institute for Information Industry, a local Taiwan not-for-profit information technology organization.

In FY2002, the AOAWS System successfully completed its final Site and Reliability Acceptance Tests. The System is now operational and being used by the aviation community in Taiwan and by airlines that fly into Taiwan. Although NCAR will provide support and maintenance services through 2003, the system is being operated on a daily basis by the Taiwan CAA.

The AOAWS consists of advanced meteorological sensor systems (at airports and within the Taiwan airspace), a communications infrastructure, a product generation component, a system server component that distributes products to users, and several product displays that present the advanced aviation weather information to end users. AOAWS system components are fully integrated to form an operational, turnkey system that serves the aviation community flying within or through Taiwan airspace.

The AOAWS will provide the CAA, the airlines and the flying public with state-of-the-art aviation weather technology for: 1) hazardous weather phenomena that affect aviation operations (e.g., in-flight icing, clear air turbulence, windshear, and thunderstorms); 2) weather phenomena that affect airspace capacity and safety at the major hub airports; and 3) weather phenomena that affect overall efficiency of aviation operations. The AOAWS is a complex system utilizing several advanced weather sensing subsystems, integrated communications, advanced software developed by NCAR/RAP, advanced numerical weather forecast models developed by NCAR/MMM, and NCAR/RAP developed advanced interactive and web based display technology. System displays are located at the Taipei Aeronautical Meteorological Center, several Weather Forecast Stations and Flight Information Service facilities at Taiwan airports, and at the Taipei Area Control Center.

This technology transfer project was completed on schedule and within budget. The CAA has expressed strong interest in a second-phase program that will be designed to ensure the CAA continues to have a state-of-the-art aviation weather capability.

* The AOAWS won NCAR's Scientific and Technical Outstanding Accomplishment Award in 2002, which recognizes efforts leading to substantial improvements in scientific and/or technical capabilities, including advances in hardware or software engineering, computer science, and applied science. The project and team was recognized for the "efforts of a large, interdivisional team that has worked together for the past six years".

The team award went to: Bill Mahoney, Mike Dixon, Deirdre Garvey, Frank Hage, Celia Chen, David Johnson, Niles Oien Susan Dettling, and Carol Park from RAP; Jordan Powers, Jim Bresch, Dale Barker and Al Bourgeois from M3MMM, and Bill Kuo from MMM and COSMIC.

In selecting the winner for this award, the Jury stated:

"The AOWAS was a major effort on many fronts. It involved significant scientific and technical challenges including innovative augmentations of the state-of-the-art weather forecasting software to incorporate new data assimilation capabilities as well as a substantial effort to port the software to a new supercomputing system. These are difficult tasks in a research setting, but the end product in this case had to be suitable for an operational decision-making environment. "

"The 3D data assimilation will have wide applicability in other real-time settings. But, just as important, the initiative required sensitive international interactions with technical, scientific, regulatory, and commercial organizations in another country. Working on a system half a world away from home base, the AOAWS team delivered a very complicated and sophisticated aviation weather system on time and within budget. The broader impacts of the effort are many: UCAR's scientific and technical reputation is enhanced internationally; a foreign country now has a modernized aviation weather capability; and the state of the art in conveyance of real-time aviation weather information [is facilitated]."

3. Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS)

The Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS), jointly developed by NCAR-RAP, NOAA-FSL, and the NCEP-Aviation Weather Center (AWC) disseminates weather products to the aviation community via the web (http://adds.aviationweather.gov). ADDS is a single source for all aviation weather needs with methods to retrieve raw observations and forecast data, simple and quick loading graphics, and increased interaction with data using Java. Besides standard National Weather Service data, ADDS also displays the products developed under the FAA Aviation Weather Research program which include an icing diagnosis (AID), turbulence detection and forecast (IF), and a convection diagnosis plus forecast (NCWD and NCWF).

In late 2001, AWC applied for and received approval to transfer the URL to the highest level .gov address, thus the new URL was simplified to adds.aviationweather.gov. Also, new and more robust hardware with automatic failover capability was instituted for the site. Currently, if the site has a hardware failure on one machine, the second machine assumes the ADDS web presence and keeps the site open for use.

In Spring 2002, the FAA and NWS declared the icing product and IIDA operational, changing its name to Current Icing Potential (CIP). IIDA products had been available on ADDS for over a year but data were shipped from NCAR-RAP to AWC. Now that CIP is operational at AWC, the data are transferred within AWC to ADDS hardware for creation of plots and availability in the Flight Path Tool. Next in line for the transition from experimental to operational status is the turbulence product, ITFA.

Throughout 2002 and continuing in 2003, ADDS developers have been working to improve reliability and transfer control of the entire site to the AWC. When this work is completed, ADDS should satisfy FAA requirements to conform to a new Qualified Internet Content Providers (QICP) policy for aviation weather data dissemination.

 

4. FY02 technology transfer accomplishments in 4DWX program

Since 1995, a team of RAP engineers and scientists have developed and implemented a four-dimensional weather (4DWX) system for the US Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC), and recently, for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). As the system consists of late-breaking engineering technologies, and scientific advancements in numerical weather prediction - and furthermore must operate reliably in live, mission-critical situations - RAP has been faced with a substantial technology transfer challenge, which includes the regular training of DOD staff at seven locations around the US on systems that are frequently updated.

The 4DWX system provides the ATEC meteorology groups with their primary source of weather data, analyses and forecasts. Forecasting decisions are routinely based on the 4DWX tools that provide high-resolution, range-specific information and forecasts of low-level winds, expected dispersion patterns of biochemical simulant agents, noise propagation patterns from high-explosives detonation, accurate thunderstorm locations, and model-derived climatological information. In addition, capabilities provide worldwide weather information and model output are available for support of international missions. The system consists of a suite of modeling, algorithm and data handling modules designed to provide advanced meteorological analyses, forecasts and displays for meteorological units at Army test ranges and proving grounds throughout the United States. System modules include: 1) a data management, ingest, archival, and display system; 2) a product distribution system employing the WWW; 3) high-resolution (1.1 km) MM5 modeling capabilities; and 4) fuzzy-logic techniques for short-term thunderstorm forecasting. To date, 4DWX systems have been fielded at seven ATEC facilities around the country, and are continuously monitored and improved by the 4DWX development team. Within the last year, 4DWX systems were transferred to another branch of the Army to support live operations in Afghanistan, and to DTRA, in support of live exercises to mitigate the effect of weapons of mass destruction for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Figure 1 shows the general 4DWX system architecture, in terms of the product flows.

One of the substantial challenges in technology transfer has been creating and deploying stable linux clusters for running the high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) component of the systems. While traditional, single-image, shared memory platforms like SGI and Fujitsu are very suitable for NWP applications, the 4DWX clients require a number of platforms to be deployed. However, the hardware budget does not allow for the purchase of these mainframe class machines. As a result of this, RAP has had to develop the forecast systems on distributed memory, parallel processing clusters, running the Linux operating system and using commodity hardware components. The challenge to produce stable platforms is particularly acute in that the 4DWX NWP systems run continuously around the clock, and are usually located in remote facilities where the power source tends to be unstable and generally unreliable.

 

Figure 1: 4DWX Weather Product Flows

Figure 2 shows examples of the front and back views of these clusters, which tend to be configured as either 16- or 32-node systems for each of the test ranges.

Figure 2: Front view of systems located at NCAR Foothills Lab, and back view of systems located at NCAR Mesa Lab

As part of the technology transfer work for these clusters, RAP has had to incorporate advanced power monitoring and fault-tolerant software into each cluster system, as the range test schedules have become more demanding and critical since 11 September 2001.

While test range weather forecasters have a great deal of experience in interpreting local meteorology, few have experience with or understanding of high-resolution mesoscale modeling. An ongoing challenge in transferring 4DWX technology to the ranges has been to impart sufficiently high levels of interpretive skills to the forecasters, so that they may better utilize the model forecast output information. RAP's mesoscale forecasting training has substantially improved the forecaster's effectiveness in providing test guidance to their own clients. In FY02, new training modules were created to stimulate new ideas on how to interpret model output. The test range meteorology chiefs are currently considering ways of incorporating such training in the forecasters' annual reviews, to integrate their studies into their assigned duties. An example of a training module can be found at:

http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/individual/davis/atec/training.html

4. Current Icing Potential (CIP)

The FAA recently formed the Aviation Weather Technology Transfer (AWTT) Board consisting of FAA and NWS staff who review and approve aviation weather products for experimental or operational use. The review process is rigorous and includes examination of the physical basis of the product, verification results and the concept of use by the aviation community. This insures that new products will meet a high standard of quality. In March 2002, the RAP Current Icing Product (CIP) was designated operational by the AWTT Board.

CIP was developed as part of the 12-year FAA-sponsored program in inflight icing. The algorithm combines information from a numerical weather prediction model and observations to provide a 3D gridded depiction of the likelihood of icing over the CONUS.

The technology transfer process was achieved over winter 2001-2002, and was led by G. Cunning who worked with F. McDonough, B. Bernstein, M. Politovich, as well as with software engineers at the NWS Aviation Weather Center (AWC). The actual transfer of code to computers at the AWC required considerable effort. The software had to be tailored to the different data sources and formats used there, compared to its original home at NCAR. During the process, the code was streamlined to run more quickly, and hardened to avoid failures. Additional effort was required to produce graphical and gridded products on the Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS) from the transferred code. G. Thompson, S. Knight and A. Dumont designed the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

 

 

Output is now available on ADDS in graphical format including constant-altitude views and vertical cross-sections along user-selected flight paths. Gridded output is also available in GRIB format. The user may also link to a page that provides in formation about the expected quality of the algorithm, where verification statistics in several formats are shown to provide a measure of confidence in the product.

The forecast version of this product, the FIP, was declared experimental by the AWTT board in May and also appears on ADDS. It is slated to graduate to operational status in May 2003.

 

 

5. Winter Road Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS)

In FY2000, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Road Weather Management Program began a project to develop a prototype winter road Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS). The MDSS is designed to provide guidance on winter maintenance decisions (treatment times, types, rates, and locations) specific to winter road maintenance routes. Five national research centers have participated in the development of the functional prototype MDSS. The participating national labs include the Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Lincoln Laboratory (MIT/LL), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), and NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL). NCAR's Research Application Program (RAP) is the lead lab for technical development and program coordination.

The requirements-gathering phase of the MDSS project began in FY00. In FY01 the goal was to develop a conceptual prototype MDSS and in FY2002 a functional prototype was developed. An MDSS field demonstration and verification project will occur during winter 2003 in Iowa for snow plow routes near Des Moines and Ames. System refinements will be made based on the results of the field demonstration and they will become part of the second system release.

Technology transfer is a major component of the MDSS Project. The MDSS functional prototype software (version-1) was developed during FY02. The overarching goal of the MDSS project is to accelerate the time to market for MDSS capabilities; therefore the MDSS and its components were made available to the public on a non-exclusive basis in September 2002. Interested parties can register for a CD with documentation and code via a RAP web site.

 

The MDSS FP is designed to be a template for future operational capabilities. We envision that the private sector, together with local DOTs, will review the FP and jointly develop operational versions of the system whether standalone or integrated with broader decision support systems.

 

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