Integration of Digital Weather and Air Traffic Data for NextGen

The FAA's NextGen Weather Processor and Common Support Services - Weather programs will enable significantly higher-performance weather product generation and dissemination capabilities than are possible with today's systems. In addition to covering an expanded geographical region, NextGen weather consolidates, improves, and expands terminal and en route weather information using a flexible framework based on standard services and standard data formats. Decision support systems may utilize weather images using Aviation Weather Display functions. NextGen weather services also provide digital data in standardized formats including eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Network Common Data Form (NetCDF), so it is possible to integrate digital weather data with air traffic information. Such digital integration can be done in parallel using a Big Data framework that enables machine learning to assist in more efficient traffic management. In this paper we present an approach using a Big Data framework to perform data fusion of NextGen weather products with synthetic flight trajectory data. These services combine weather and air traffic information utilizing business rules to estimate weather impact. The paper also discusses other scenarios for use of such data and services in air traffic management.