Benefit analysis of remote oceanic meteorology information operational (Romio) demonstration

Convective weather is a significant factor causing airspace restrictions to commercial air traffic. Frequent weather updates are critical for flights over oceans and regions with limited coverage of ground-based radars since convective weather events (e.g., thunderstorms) can evolve relatively fast. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Weather Technology in the Cockpit (WTIC) program has sponsored the Remote Oceanic Meteorology Information Operational (ROMIO) demonstration to evaluate the feasibility of uplinking convective weather products into the flight deck of oceanic and remote flights. For this purpose, two satellite-based weather products developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) were used, namely the Cloud Top Height (CTH) and Convection Diagnosis Oceanic (CDO) products. In this paper, we studied the operational benefits of using the ROMIO application by analyzing over 18,000 historical flight trajectories crossing the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). We used flight azimuth analysis to identify two types of weather deviations (i.e., macroscopic and microscopic) for avoiding inclement weather. Using the ROMIO demonstration display enhances the situational awareness and helps pilots to identify adverse weather earlier compared to airborne radars. We quantified the potential benefits of the ROMIO-aided strategic decision making in terms of travel distance, travel time, fuel consumption, and greenhouse gas emission savings. Also, we extracted several features of weather deviation maneuvers including maximum lateral deviations from flight plans, deviation angles, deviation times, and Closest Point of Approaches (CPA) to CDO and CTH contours. We considered a pilot survey to select flights that employed the ROMIO application for convective weather avoidance and compared the distribution of deviation angles and lateral deviations in the Pre-ROMIO and Post-ROMIO periods.