BOULDER — Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research are working on a system that aims to provide pilots of transoceanic flights more precise information about turbulence and storms in their flight path.
The research took on added meaning after last month’s crash of Air France Flight 447, which fell into the south Atlantic while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew members were killed.
It is too early to know what caused the crash, but weather-satellite information suggests that the Air France pilots flew at least 50 miles through a storm where cloud tops reached as high as 50,000 feet, said John Williams of NCAR’s Research Applications Laboratory.
Tall storm clouds can be associated with intense updrafts and turbulence, he said.
Along with other scientists at NCAR and researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, Williams has been working on developing a global turbulence and storm forecasting system that could give pilots of flights over remote oceanic areas access to more detailed weather data.
The researchers are blending satellite data with computerized weather models and using artificial intelligence to develop real-time depictions of storm activity and turbulence that could be uplinked to pilots on transoceanic flights, said Williams, 42, who has worked at NCAR for 12 years. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
On flights over the United States, researchers can draw on ground-based radar, pilot reports and automated reports from aircraft to develop enhanced forecasts of turbulence and storms, he said.
But pilots flying over remote oceanic regions have only a narrow view from their airborne radar of evolving weather ahead.
They depend on a pre-flight briefing on the expected weather along their route and the airborne radar, but they do not have a broad picture of storm activity and potential turbulence, Williams said.
To show the kind of information that could be available to pilots of trans oceanic flights, Williams called up on his computer screen satellite-derived images of storm conditions along the route of Air France Flight 447 just before it crashed June 1.
He said it showed a storm stretching more than 300 miles wide and 60 miles long.
“There is much room for improvement in the weather information available to pilots flying oceanic routes,” according to a presentation the NCAR and Wisconsin researchers made to an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in San Antonio on June 22. “Turbulence in storms and clouds can be intense, patchy and short-lived. Airborne radar may not be adequate to pick a safe route.”
Last week, Air France chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon told the French newspaper Le Figaro that a pilot of an Air France São Paulo-to-Paris flight, trailing Flight 447, had “crossed a first turbulent area that had not been picked up by his radar, and as a result, he avoided a much worse one by manually increasing the sensitivity of his radar.”
“Flight 447 didn’t have the good fortune to encounter that first warning and may not have been able to avoid the second very active storm. On the strength of that report, we are going to review the way we use radar,” Gourgeon said in a transcript of the Figaro interview released by Air France.
The airline also will “take another look at crew training” and “the quality of the weather information we have available,” Gourgeon said.
The path of Flight 447 shows it flew through the middle of the storm, but if there had been the capability of sending the flight crew a depiction of the storm and potential turbulence ahead, pilots might have had the information they needed to skirt the hazardous area, NCAR’s Williams said.
“Onboard radar is great. It gives rapid updates but not necessarily the broad view,” he said. “What pilots need is a 3-D, wide-angled and deep depiction of what is coming up.”
Such an upgrade in weather information would help improve the “situational awareness” that pilots on oceanic flights would have about storms or turbulence, said Kevin Johnston, senior meteorologist in system operations at the Federal Aviation Administration’s command center in Herndon, Va.
It would give “more advance notice of potential hazardous weather within their route of flight,” he said.
Jeffrey Leib: 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com
