Distributing net-enabled federal aviation administration (FAA) weather data

The FAA, under the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program, is pursuing development of net-enabled services together with underlying technologies to implement new data sharing capabilities in the National Airspace System (NAS). SWIM offers a means to achieve a dynamic and flexible operating environment using network- enabling technologies that increase agility, improve interoperability and increase data sharing among users. This paper describes plans currently under consideration by the FAA and SWIM to develop net-enabled services to promote the efficient distribution of FAA weather data for terminal, en- route, and traffic flow operations. The services will be designed to support interfaces for both human- to-machine as well as machine-to-machine communication. Weather services will also be available for design-time discovery by prospective consumers to facilitate a common weather picture for the aviation community. This paper concludes with a description of future plans for distribution of FAA weather data by SWIM that provide incremental steps towards the strategy and roadmap being developed by the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) and the FAA's NextGen Network Enabled Weather (NNEW) program. Future plans include possible access to sensor and model weather data and enhanced implementations of SWIM service registries to facilitate future concepts of net-enabled NAS operations.