On the Development of a Digital Meteorological Model for Simulating Future Air Traffic Management Automation

Aviation Meteorology plays an essential role for the Air Traffic Management (ATM) automation. The availability of accurate estimates of atmosphere properties would largely increase safety and efficiency of air traffic operations. The work presented here looks forward to a net-centric service-oriented ATM system architecture where available data, air-ground connectivity and modern computational resources and techniques are taken advantage of to attain a 4D predictive model of atmospheric properties specifically designed for real-time support to air vehicle operations in highly dense terminal manoeuvring areas. The effort, conducted as part of the ATLANTIDA project, consists of the development of a digital meteo model (DMET) that combines atmospheric data from several sources into a 4D predictive scenario that is made available to subscribers through periodic updates. Atmospheric data sources include forecasts from global and mesoscale weather models as well as live observations provided by ground stations and aircraft in the scene. The model produced consists of a 4D grid of pressure, temperature and wind data fields valid over 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 trajectories are simulated and shown, all being processed remotely in a supercomputing centre.