A Real Time Graphical Airport Weather Display
Senior Project: 1990-1991
Douglas Farmer, Antony Holmes, Simon Rademacher and Michael Roadifer
NCAR Research Applications Program (RAP) supports a graphical weather display
that is used by the Federal Aviation Administration at Stapleton International
Airport in Denver. The display runs on a Sun 3/60, Sun OS4.0, under SunView and
allows the controllers at Stapleton to view hazardous weather in the vicinity
of the airport in real-time. This display shows weather products such as
microbursts, precipitation, low-level wind shear, and gust fronts as they
occurred, the data being received continuously from instrumentation at the
airport and in the vicinity.
For a variety of reasons, NCAR was interested in seeing a different approach to
such a display. First, SunView is a proprietary system, limiting portability of
the display to other hardware platforms. A display based on the X Window System
was desired. A second issue was system extensibility. When the initial system
was designed, the ability to easily add new weather products was not a
priority. A new system should be explicitly designed for extensibility.
Finally, RAP wanted to see any new approaches and ideas a student team might
have for the design and implementation of a solution to the problem,
particularly with respect to the user interface.
The new display consists of a main window displaying the weather products,
along with surface features such as major highways, airport runways, outlying
airports, and the location of navigational equipment such as VORTACs and FIXes.
The display also has a control panel, which allows the user to manage the
display, turning on and off the visibility of individual weather products and
surface features, controlling the surface area under consideration from 5 to 50
nautical miles in radius, as well as the management of runway assignments for
controllers in the tower. The resulting software provided a simple, consistent
interface, while meeting rather stringent speed requirements. It also allowed
for easy incorporation of new weather products, and provided further
extensibility to different airports through run time configuration files. The
project was implemented in C and UNIX to run on Sun SPARCstation 2
workstations.
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