Benefits of promulgating higher resolution wind data for airline route planning

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.