Synthesizing Weather Information for Preflight Planning

Challenge

Pilots have an overwhelming amount of weather information to wade through and a lot of it is not tailored to a specific flight plan. A system that tailors the weather information and presents it in an intuitive manner and can deliver data to airline dispatch operations was required.

Solution

Aviation Digital Data Service (ADDS)

ADDS is well known within the aviation community for its innovative, user-friendly methods of presentation. NCAR combined its advanced gridded aviation products (e.g., icing, turbulence, convective hazards) along with the traditionally used aviation weather products, such as AIRMETs, SIGMETs and METARs into a single application.

Benefits

Since 1996, pilots, dispatchers, the military, airlines, and airports have benefited from increased weather awareness because of the comprehensive weather information available on ADDS. Today, Operational ADDS is hosted at the National Weather Service Aviation Weather Center.  This site gets an average of 10 million hits per day with major users being commercial airline and general aviation pilots

Contact

Please direct questions/comments about this page to:

Arnaud Dumont

Deputy Director Engineering, Aviation Applications Program

email