Digital meteorological service (DMET) in support of trajectory optimization and ATM automation

An improvement is required in the meteorological support for the future Air Traffic Management (ATM) System. New concepts of weather services must be tailored to enable a safer and more efficient aviation: better accuracy, increased data availability, real time support, digital service and shared information are some of the foundational elements underlying trajectory optimization, automation of operations, and fuel & time cost-reductions. A Digital Meteorological Service (DMET) is cornerstone in a net-centric service-oriented ATM system architecture where available data, air-ground connectivity and modern computational resources are taken advantage of to attain a 4D predictive model specifically designed for real-time support to aircraft operations. The effort presented here consists on the development of a prototype DMET service that computes atmospheric data from several sources to produce predicted 4D atmosphere scenarios regularly available to subscribers. By using many data sources –such as forecasts from global and mesoscale weather models, in-situ observations and the introduction of local airborne parameters, a well-tailored forecast product is developed. It consists of a 4D grid of pressure, temperature and wind data fields that are valid into an airspace cube of about 150 × 150 × 20 km, within a time interval of 2.5 hours. On top of this model, minimum time, minimum consumption and other interesting weather-based optimization functions are covered, all being processed in parallel for a future migration to a supercomputing centre.