The use of flight track and convective weather densities for national airspace system efficiency analysis

This paper presents an analytical framework for conducting NAS (national airspace system)-wide performance assessments. The proposed approach segments the national airspace into a two-dimensional grid; superimposes flight tracks, flight plans, convective activity, and convective forecasts onto this grid; and then uses statistical techniques to compare these densities. In this manner one can quantify such things as the difference between planned and actual routes, the accuracy of convective forecasts, the impact of severe weather on traffic, etc. The use of two-dimensional statistical techniques borrowed from the fields of image processing and geostatistics can remove much of the arbitrariness involved in previous approaches, which attempt to match similar days.