DOT 11-10
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Contact: Olivia Alair
Tel.: 202-366-4570

Additional Assistance Includes Ferry Service and Exemptions that Expand the Pool of Aircraft Available to Help in Relief Efforts

At the request of the Haitian government, the Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) dispatched a portable, temporary control tower to Haiti today to help assist with aircraft operations at Port-au-Prince International Airport. The tower is being transported aboard a large, chartered cargo aircraft and FAA technicians will install and prepare it for service which will take about 48 hours once it arrives in Port-au-Prince.

“This tower is a visible representation of the Department’s contribution to our government’s swift and considerable efforts to help Haiti deal with this terrible tragedy,” said DOT Secretary Ray LaHood. “We had great support from the military in arranging for the transport of this critical equipment.”

“We are all grateful for the incredible effort put in by FAA employees who have worked around the clock in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to help relief supplies and emergency responders arrive quickly and efficiently,” said FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt.

The portable tower is 44 feet long, 13 feet high and eight feet wide, and weighs about 25,000 pounds. It comes with two diesel-powered generators and supporting fuel tanks, plus tools and other support equipment for installation and maintenance. The FAA uses this tower and others like it to support airports where existing towers are out of service after a disaster, like a major hurricane.

Controllers providing terminal air traffic control services have worked outside at a folding table, using military radios to handle about 160 flights a day. The airport’s control tower was rendered unusable by the devastating earthquake on January 12. Tower controllers provide service to arriving and departing flights in the immediate area of the airport and serve as ground controllers for movements on the airport surface.

Besides air traffic employees, the FAA has an airports division team on the ground to inspect and evaluate the physical condition of the runway as it handles a high volume of heavy military transport and cargo aircraft.

Immediately following the earthquake, the Department granted two exemptions from current aviation restrictions, expanding the pool of available aircraft by making them easier to charter. The first exemption helps streamline the ability of the U.S. Government to procure charter air services on short notice. The second granted authority to a class of carriers that operate large aircraft in private carriage, allowing them to evacuate persons from and bring personnel and supplies to the disaster area. Without this exemption, such conduct could violate the Department’s economic licensing requirement for airlines.

In addition to the FAA assistance, Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff granted an emergency petition to the principal public ferry service in Puerto Rico to use the Federally-funded vessel the “Cayo Largo” to transport 65 rescuers, rescue vehicles, and medicine to the port of Baraona, Dominican Republic to help in the Haiti relief effort. The ship sailed Monday from San Juan.

Also over the past week, the Department’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) mobilized six ships to assist with relief efforts in Haiti. Gopher State, Petersburg, Huakai, Alakai, Cornhusker State and Cape May are all either being prepared or currently loading. All are owned or controlled by MARAD, and will be crewed by civilian U.S. merchant mariners.

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July 07, 2009

BOULDER—The National Center for Atmospheric Research is developing a prototype system to provide aircraft with updates about severe storms and turbulence as they fly across remote ocean regions. The system is designed to help guide pilots away from intense weather, such as the thunderstorms that Air France Flight 447 apparently encountered before crashing into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1.

The NCAR system, being developed with funding from NASA, combines satellite data and computer weather models with cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques to identify and predict rapidly evolving storms and other potential areas of turbulence. The system is based on products that NCAR has developed to alert pilots and air traffic controllers about storms and turbulence over the continental United States.

“Pilots currently have little weather information as they fly over remote stretches of the ocean, which is where some of the worst turbulence encounters occur,” says NCAR scientist John Williams, one of the project leads. “Providing pilots with at least an approximate picture of developing storms could help guide them safely around areas of potentially severe turbulence.”

The component of the system that identifies major storms over the ocean is already available for aircraft use on an experimental basis.

The entire prototype system, which will identify areas of turbulence in clear air as well as within storms, is on track for testing next year. Pilots on selected transoceanic routes will receive real-time turbulence updates and then provide feedback on the system to NCAR. The researchers will adjust the system as needed.

When the system is finalized in about two years, it will provide pilots and ground-based controllers with text-based maps and graphical displays showing likely regions of turbulence and of storms.

In addition to NCAR, other organizations taking part in the research include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Flying with little information

Pinpointing turbulence over the oceans is far more challenging than over land because of sparse observations. Weather satellites are often the only source of information over these remote regions. But the satellites provide images less frequently in general than over land, which can make it difficult to capture fast-changing conditions, and they do not directly measure turbulence.

Pilots of transoceanic flights currently get preflight briefings and, in certain cases involving especially intense storms, in-flight weather updates every four hours. They also have onboard radar.

All this information, however, is of limited value. Thunderstorms may develop quickly and move rapidly, rendering the briefings and weather updates obsolete. Onboard radars are designed to detect clouds and precipitation, but turbulence is often located far from the most intense precipitation. As a result, pilots often must choose between detouring hundreds of miles around potentially stormy areas or taking a chance and flying directly through a region that may or may not contain intense weather.

In contrast, NCAR provides real-time maps of turbulence at various altitudes over the continental United States. Such a system, had it encompassed remote ocean regions, could have alerted the pilots of the doomed Air France flight to the stormy conditions along their flight path. The cause of that disaster has not been determined, and it is impossible to know whether the system could have prevented it.

“It seems likely that the information provided by a real-time uplink of weather conditions ahead would have, at a minimum, improved the pilots’ situational awareness,” Williams says.

Pinpointing the turbulence

Williams and his colleagues have recently completed two critical steps in identifying turbulence over the oceans:

The team has created global maps of clear air turbulence based on global computer weather models that include winds and other instabilities in the atmosphere. Clear air turbulence consists of erratic movements of air masses that occur in the absence of clouds and that sometimes buffet aircraft.

Drawing on satellite images of storms, the scientists have created global views of the tops of storm clouds. Higher cloud tops are often correlated with intense storms, although not necessarily with turbulence.

The next step is to identify areas of possible turbulence within and around intense storms. To do so, the team will study correlations between storms and turbulence over the continental United States where weather is more closely observed. The scientists will then infer the likelihood of turbulence associated with storms over the oceans, keying in on satellite indicators such as rapidly expanding clouds or places where the tops of storm clouds are cooling quickly.

They will also develop mathematical equations to account for differences in cloud systems over the United States compared to over the oceans, including the tropics.

Artificial intelligence at work

In addition to providing aircraft and ground controllers with up-to-the-minute maps of turbulence, the NCAR team is turning to an artificial intelligence technique, known as “random forests,” to provide short-term forecasts of turbulence. The random forests, which have proven useful for forecasting thunderstorms over land, consist of many decision trees that each cast a yes-or-no “vote” on crucial elements of a storm at future points in time and space. This enables scientists to forecast the movement and strength of the storm over the next few hours.

“Our goal is to give pilots a regularly updated picture of the likely storms ahead as they fly over the ocean so they can take action to minimize turbulence and keep their aircraft out of danger,” explains NCAR scientist Cathy Kessinger, a project team member. “Even over the middle of the ocean, where we don’t have land-based radars or other tools to observe storms in detail, we can still inform pilots about the potential for violent downdrafts, turbulence, and possibly lightning.”

source:
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/ocean-air-turbulence.jsp#
©2009, UCAR