FPAW Fall 2024 Meeting

Fall 2024 FPAW Meeting Preview

The Fall 2024 FPAW Meeting will take place from Tuesday, October 29, 2024 through Thursday, October 31, 2024 in the Auditorium of the FAA William J. Hughes Center for Advanced Aerospace (formerly the Technical Center) in Atlantic City, NJ. Costumes are optional for the final day.

Current plans are to start each day’s sessions at 10:00 AM and conclude them at 5:00 PM. Tours of several of the Center’s labs will be held prior to start of the sessions on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, and Thursday, October 31, 2024, from 8:30 AM-9:30 AM each day.

The following sections describe the Long (~4-5 hour) and Short (~ 1 hour) sessions that will be featured during the meeting. Note that the exact order (which sessions on which days) and timing (exact start and stop times) of sessions have not yet been finalized.

Long Session 1: FAA Enterprise Weather Data – CSS-Wx and NWP

Session Co-Leads: Doug Murphy (FAA) and Jeff Sarver (UPS/A4A)

Description: It has been several years since FPAW last received a comprehensive briefing from the FAA on the Common Support Services-Weather (CSS-Wx) and NextGen Weather Processor (NWP) systems. Given the location and timing of this meeting, the FPAW Steering Committee (FPAW SC) determined that a detailed, hands-on update for these two new systems was both desirable and appropriate.

CSS-Wx and NWP are the new FAA Enterprise-level sources for aviation weather data. They will provide NAS stakeholders with advanced weather information to assist decision-making and ultimately improve efficiency and safety in the NAS. The FAA’s Program Management Office (PMO) is currently in the final stages of testing and rolling out both systems, and their products and capabilities will be available to both internal (FAA) and external customers in the coming months.

This session will include information on the weather products that will be available via CSS-Wx and NWP. It will describe how all users can access raw data for integration into decision-support tools and provide insight into practical operational applications both inside and outside the FAA.

Confirmed Presenters/Panelists: TBD

Long Session 2: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Aviation Weather and Decision Making

Session Co-Leads: Matt Wandishin (NOAA GSL) and John Williams (The Weather Company)

Description: While artificial intelligence methods have been used in aviation weather since at least the 1980s, recent advances in AI methodologies and computing power signal a sea change in their performance and applicability that will have dramatic ramifications in our field for years to come.

This session will include a primer on AI methods and describe their evolution and past applications in aviation weather. It will explain how AI is beginning to surpass traditional physics-based numerical weather prediction in accuracy and discuss how the incredible computational efficiency of AI-NWP will improve uncertainty quantification essential for optimizing decisions.

AI is also being used to relate forecasts to weather impacts on aviation, providing actionable information that can be used to streamline and optimize operations. Generative AI is also showing promise as a flexible avenue for providing bespoke guidance and recommendations to support decision making to a wide variety of users. Methods for designing and evaluating AI methods to ensure that they are trustworthy will also be presented.

Speakers in this session will represent diverse perspectives from industry, government and academia. The session will include talks, demos, a panel discussion and interactive brainstorming.

Confirmed Presenters/Panelists:

Jaideep Pathak (NVIDIA) – Kilometer-Scale Convection Allowing Model Emulation using Generative Diffusion Modeling

Patty McDermott and Christine Taylor (MITRE) – An AI-Enabled TFM Prototype

Long Session 3: The Art of the Possible

Session Co-Leads: Starr McGettigan (FAA) and Mike Robinson (MITRE)

Description: This session is focused on challenging established, legacy paradigms and priorities and turning the problem/solution-space on its head to see if alternative innovations, outcomes, and benefits may be achieved from deliberate, divergent thinking (and what R&D and innovations may be leveraged to spur alternative paradigms to aviation ‘weather proofing’).

New View of Weather-ATM Integration: Weather Resiliency from the AVIATION-side

This sub-session seeks to view weather- Air Traffic Management (ATM) integration from the alternative perspective where we examine ways the NAS and its stakeholders and operators may become more weather resilient independent of any improved weather observation and forecast support for ATM decision-making. Topics will include minimum equipage/requirements needed to mitigate weather; lessons learned from airline contingency planning applied to schedule, crew, maintenance and/or revenue management and how those methods / best practices may apply and empower ATM weather resiliency; and technologies and strategies to increase weather resilience at vertiports. A panel discussion will close out the sub-session by summing up key takeaways and examining scalability of these new ways of thinking. Demonstrations will be leveraged during this session to help drive discussion and promote divergent thinking.

Moving Further Outside The Box for Weather Resiliency and Optimization

This sub-session will explore additional “outside the box” approaches and thinking as a path to increase weather resiliency and optimization. Topics will include approaches to modernize access to weather observation data by leveraging sustainment technology; leveraging blockchain technology (and its applications in other markets) and other concepts / methods to enable decentralized, evidence-based collaboration for improved aviation weather resiliency; and examining smart airport concepts with a focus on IoT and improving weather resiliency.

Confirmed Presenters/Panelists:

Victor Passetti and Steve Maciejewski (FAA) – Weather Observations

Cliff Johnson (FAA) – Synthetic Vision

Short Session 1: FAA Weather Community of Interest (Wx COI) Update and Conversation

Session Co-Leads: Randy Bass and Alfred Moosakhanian (FAA)

Description: The FAA Weather Community of Interest (Wx COI) is a cross-agency aviation weather body. Although it is an internal FAA group, it does have a mandate to appropriately engage with relevant external organizations. FPAW is considered one of those organizations.

Randy Bass and Alfred Moosakhanian will update the FPAW community on the proceedings of the FAA Wx COI over the last six months, to include sharing information about the Problem Statements being worked by the Wx COI’s Special Weather Action Teams (SWATs). In addition, they will brief FPAW on the formation and work of a Wx COI Strategic Planning Team (SPT) and its role in producing an FAA Weather Strategy. Finally, they will update the group on efforts to set up a formal relationship between FAA Wx COI and FPAW, one intended to establish routine, effective two-way communications between the two groups.

Short Sessions 2 and 3: Interactive Tours and Demonstrations

Session Co-Leads: Matt Fronzak (MITRE) and Starr McGettigan (FAA)

Description: With all its laboratories and hands-on demonstration areas, some knowledgeable insiders have suggested that being an aviation technology geek (which the FPAW Co-Chairs believe describes most FPAW members) at the FAA William J. Hughes Center for Advanced Aerospace is very much like being a kid at a candy store.

Consequently, the remaining two short (1-hour) sessions will be used to provide interactive tours of those laboratories and demonstration areas, either after the two associated long sessions have concluded, or interspersed within, and as part of, those long sessions.

More information on this topic will be forthcoming as soon as practical, and for sure when the agenda is published in a few short weeks, but we can state one thing with certainty: this experience will be FAR superior in person than virtually. So, why don’t you plan to join us!

Registration