Benefits of promulgating higher resolution wind data for airline route planning

Abstract

A study has been undertaken to determine whether there are useable incremental benefits from providing upper air wind data at high horizontal resolution to the process of airline flight planning. Currently winds are provided on a horizontal resolution of approximately 140 km. The study looked at resolutions varying between 160 and 40 km. A theoretical calculation was undertaken using published variance power spectra, which quantify the wind variability as a function of horizontal scale. This calculation also used a published formula for the time saving in flying across an area of constant vorticity. The results of the theoretical calculation were expressed in terms of the time saving on a transatlantic flight lasting typically 8 h stemming from a resolution change from 160 to 80 km. In this case the answer was well under one second. It is thought that such a small incremental benefit could not be used to justify the practical steps needed to exploit high resolution data. The more practical part of the study involved running an optimum routes diagnosis package with variable resolution input data. Input data at resolutions of 160 and 40 km were considered. Although this approach was only applied to a restricted number of cases and routes, it confirmed the theoretical result.  Crown

Transatlantic flight times and climate change

“…We calculate the latitudinal and longitudinal wind gradients, which feature in the heading equation, using second-order centred differences. Although the GFDLCM2.1 model is coarser in resolution than the models that are used operationally in flight planning, minimum-time routes have been found to display no significant dependence on the horizontal resolution of the ingested wind data, with flight times changing by less than 1 s for a typical transatlantic flight when the resolution is doubled (Lunnon and Mirza 2007). A winter climatology of the minimum-time routes calculated by the algorithm for the pre-industrial control simulation is shown in figure 3.…”

The role of airspeed variability in fixed-time, fuel-optimal aircraft trajectory planning

“…Linear interpolation is then applied to obtain wind components and temperature at specific points in a trajectory. This approach is justified as long haul flight routes have been shown to be largely insensitive to the resolution of weather data (Lunnon and Mirza 2007) and the evolution of the jet stream at this altitude shows little variation across a 24-hour period (Mangini et al 2018). The use of daily wind data is in line with methods used in previous transatlantic trajectory research (Wells et al 2021;Kim et al 2020;Williams 2016;Mangini et al 2018).…”