For air travelers, inclement weather is an all too real problem...even a nightmare.

During winter months, flights are delayed and countless connections are missed due to snow and ice. We have grown accustomed to news reports showing huddled travelers camped out like refugees in airport departure lounges.

During the spring and summer months, severe weather also wreaks havoc with airline schedules and travel plans. In fact, 70-75 percent of flight delays are weather related and most of those are due to thunderstorms. Unpredictable and fast moving thunderstorms raking one airport can ground aircraft thousands of miles away. Business travelers who must often take flights in the late afternoon and evening - prime severe weather time - are at particularly high risk of weather delays. And up until now, all we could do is talk about this Achilles heel of the air transportation system.

Although the JPDO can't change the weather, it can certainly work in creative and far reaching ways to minimize its adverse impact on air transportation and air travelers and make us more aviation "weatherwise." In fact, developing a system-wide capacity to reduce weather impacts is one of the eight broad transformation strategies for creating the Next Generation Air Transportation System.

Mark Andrews, one of two JPDO Principals for the Commerce Department, recently sat down to discuss these efforts. He pointed out that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its parent agency, the Commerce Department, had an early place at the transformation table. Two years ago, the Aerospace Commission recommended that both participate in the JPDO and two years later both are contributing to transformation in significant ways.

Mr. Andrews noted that one of the biggest goals is improved accuracy and reliability, timeliness, and relevance of aviation weather information. This will allow the Next Generation System to not merely react to weather but to look out into the future in a proactive manner. In this regard, it is critical to have a common operational picture for those involved in air traffic management. This common picture stands in stark contrast to today, where, for example, air traffic controllers at FAA Air Route Traffic Control Centers may employ five or six different forecast pictures when handling a single aircraft from Los Angeles to New York. Mr. Andrews compared this to a "football team that comes to the line without having huddled."

One of the first orders of the day for the JPDO Weather Integrated Product Team (IPT), which Mr. Andrews leads and has been in existence for a year, is to begin building a national/interagency aviation weather data base where all weather information would reside and where different products could be integrated.

Mr. Andrews underscored some obvious benefits of this approach: "The net result is that all system operators will work off of the same real time information and there will be agreement on specific weather forecasts, such as thunderstorms. The data base can also be used to provide tailored information and applications for small airports and companies, for example, which opens up some great opportunities for the private sector." However, Mr. Andrews cautioned, "You don't want to create another stovepipe. The current aviation weather system is not a 'system of systems' but rather a system of stovepipes, each doing its own thing and not connected to other critical systems like Traffic Flow Management (TFM)."

The new data base would also work in five dimensions; the current system deals in the three spatial dimensions plus time. "The next generation aviation weather system adds probability to the picture. We can then respond to probabilistic data information in a proactive manner and business and risk decisions can be made. The current system cannot adequately plan around weather; the future one will," Mr. Andrews said. Indeed, he called this change "a paradigm shift. We're getting out of the weather product business and into the weather information business."

New, integrated operational products with weather features will also allow greater decision making on the ground and in the cockpit, greatly enhancing safety and capacity - two important goals of the Next Generation Air Transportation System. Ultimately, an automated distributed data base system "could tell me how to get there; the best route to take; file the flight plan and then provide real-time updates," Mr. Andrews said.

The IPT is tasked with creating a national U.S. weather requirements plan for the Next Generation Air Transportation System in the broadest sense, not focusing only on observations, forecasting and other previously individual elements of weather. Mr. Andrews explained that existing aviation weather related policies are "fragmented and often conflicting" and that "many statutes and regulations were written in the '50s and '60s and reflect the technology of that time. They have not kept pace with change." For example, by the year 2025, technological advances will likely allow most, if not all aircraft to land in "0-0 visibility" - something unimagined 40 or 50 years ago.

Mr. Andrews went on to say that "current system rules carve out significant amounts of airspace, particularly in the enroute sector due to observed or forecast weather for safety related reasons, space that overestimates the extent of hazard." He observed that the goal is to "modify these rules by application of research and technology transition to allow these rules to be modified in such a manner to give back airspace capacity to the system without compromising safety. Safety will always be number one."

When asked about what lies ahead, Mr. Andrews noted that NASA, FAA NOAA, and DOD have already started discussion on the weather data base project. The requirements document is also a major near term focus for the IPT and they will begin to map the agencies' current efforts to support a gap analysis between the current aviation weather system and the Next Generation Air Transportation System.

Mr. Andrews stressed existing aviation weather efforts are also highly valued and will continue to produce short-term tangible benefits. The JPDO member agencies will continue to press forward on research, such as the FAA's Aviation Weather Research Program, and state of the art weather tools and products, such as the National Convective Weather Forecast that will give forecasters more focused and precise weather data to make better aviation forecasts. All of these will be integrated into the system as they are delivered. "Our ultimate goal is to marry the new weather system to what the JPDO is doing as a whole," he concluded.

Finally, someone is doing something about the weather.

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