A publication of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association
Issue link: http://natca.uberflip.com/i/713778
done an amazing j ob standing this office up and laying the groundwork for the future. The AIG Audit Group gave many compliments to the work that has been done when auditing contingency efforts. WEATHER : Matt Tucker (ZTL) is NATCA's Article 48 Representative for Weather. His update for the membership is below. Weather and Radar Processor (WARP) WARP conducted a technical center demo of test cases that were selected to show certain type of precipitation phenomena and clutter filtering. All of the test cases worked extreme ly well and the new product that will be going to ERAM will be a giant improvement over the current WARP mosaic. The deployment starts the end of August with ZTL, ZDC, and ZAU being key sites. In order for a site to start using the new mosaic , they have to be running ERAM EAD 500 or 510 . B oth ZTL and ZAU are going up later in September and will not be transitioning to the new mosaic until ERAM is ready for it. The new mosaic is a tilt - based product , not the full volume that the current mosaic is. This results in about a 25 - second update rate during hazardous weather events. The mosaic will be a little slower in areas of lessor radar coverage. In addition, the reso lution is going from 4km to 1km, so this will more accurately display the position and int ensity of the precipitation. The roll out will first be using the all data mosaic, which does have more clutter than the high confidence mosaic that will be deployed upon completion of a meteorological evaluation. It was determined to be more beneficial to deploy sooner than waiting for the evaluation to be completed on high confidence. There will be a one - page briefing item coming out for the CPC controllers and if controllers would like a lot more detailed briefing there will be an ELMS class. The cur rent WARP CBI is going to be updated as it still refers to DSR and the old mosaics. Full deployment is scheduled to be complete before the Thanksgiving moratorium. The high confidence mosaic should be out in January unless the switch from all data to high confidence is allowed during the moratorium. NEXTGEN Weather Processor (NWP) and Common Support Services - Weather (CSS - WX) A joint technical interchange meeting was held between Raytheon and Harris to discuss some of the software interface issues that are c oming up in the project and also to discuss the scheduling of product builds so they more align with each other in order to help in the testing process as the program proceeds. The first article is planned for mid 2019, the decision for key sites will be f inalized shortly and the plan is to start making site visits to socialize the program . ICAO - Meteorology Panel Two of the work streams that fall under the panel met at ICAO in Montreal to discuss working paper s that will be presented to the full panel in Oc tober. The first group was discussing SIGMETS, Volcanic Ash Advisories, and Space Weather Advisories. A number of issues that have come up are the lack of consistencies across FIR boundaries and the Services available from the respective Meteorology Servic es. A joint white paper was presented from IFALPA, IATA, and IFATCA about the need for consistent data and the need to be thinking globally and not FIR dependent. In addition to the advisory discussion was the topic of Regional Hazardous Weather Advisory C enters and the need for new ones to be stood up to fill gaps in the current system. The s econd group met to discuss how to tackle the Global Air Navigation Plan and the weather required for Trajectory - based operations (TBO). The decision was made to addres s each individual part of the GANP and apply the specific weather