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Tactical capabilities should consist of improved convective forecasting in the 0- to 2-hour time frame plus a much better air traffic management system to use these forecasts. Key elements of the air traffic management process are assessing the impact of the forecast weather on air traffic control operations; developing a mitigation plan that considers the traffic flow management and automation implications of possible solutions; expediting the process of choosing between potential mitigation plans including FAA, airline dispatch, and pilot coordination; and making it easier to dynamically reroute planes so as to implement the mitigation plan in real time. The 2- to 6-hour strategic plan should be developed with the tactical capability in mind. Given these elements of air traffic management, Dr. Evans proposed that this would include development of probabilistic forecasts that can meaningfully be used by both humans and automated air traffic management and dispatch algorithms. For example, it would allow the translation of probabilistic forecasts into estimates of airspace and terminal capacity.2 In addition, better strategic mitigation planning capability should be possible by using optimized mitigation plans for cases where convection will only reduce traffic on routes and partially reduce capacities rather than a limited set of predefined options that only consider the very rare case of impenetrable weather.
Probabilistic representations other than the ensemble model sample functions3 that have historically been used for weather forecasts may also be needed to improve decision support. Time and space Markov processes could be attractive both as an input to air traffic management and dispatch decision support tools and as a means of capturing the space and time dependencies of the weather. Explicitly representing the degree of spatial organization for the expected weather, as well as the degree of confidence in the forecasts, could potentially be very important for route and traffic flow decision making.
Successful 0- to 2-hour tactical forecasts can provide some feedback to 2- to 6-hour strategic planning efforts. Rapid progress is occurring in the development of air traffic management tools that can use the 0- to 2-hour deterministic and probabilistic forecasts to identify opportunities to safely
2
The capacity referred to here is the effective tactical capacity (Evans, 2001).
3
The individual outputs from a random process are called sample functions. In ensemble forecasting the future state of the atmosphere is represented by sampling a random process (i.e., multiple model results that differ due to uncertainty in the initial conditions or the model representation of the atmosphere). Each of the ensemble forecasts can be viewed as a sample function from the generating process.
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