Aviation Data Services

Aviation Data Services will supply relevant, accurate, detailed, and consistent high resolution weather data for integration into decision-making and visualisation systems, which can be uplinked into on-board flight management systems and integrated with ground-based decision support tools. 

Providing a global dataset with substantial amounts of data is unviable in terms of file size and transmission costs. The solution, which Aviation Data Services provides, is to make relevant and useable chunks of high-resolution data available and easily accessible as SWIM compliant services.   

The first of these Aviation Data Services 4D-Trajectory (4DT) is available.  Further services are currently in development. 

4D-Trajectory 4DT 

 The Met Office 4D-Trajectory API provides high resolution meteorological data tailored to unique flight trajectory requests.  This enables access, via an API, to high resolution weather data which would otherwise be too large and slow to ingest.  

Taking a slice of the data via an API trajectory is much quicker to transfer and can be used in a more agile way to suit users.  

Met Office high-resolution weather forecast data, as provided by 4DT, reduces flying time to under a minute between each forecast point (10km). Compared to the current World Area Forecast System (WAFS) dataset which has approximately 9 minutes of flying time (140km) between each point. WAFS Resolution 140k                      

4DT High Resolution Data

Data Available via 4DT 

The data available comes from the Met Office Global Model, which has a horizontal resolution of ~10km, 1 hourly timesteps, and covers the whole globe. Data is valid between T=0 and T=+36hrs. It is available in CovJSON format. 

The following data is available:   

· Wind U   

· Wind V   

· Temperature   

· Turbulence   

· Relative Humidity 

Benefits 

Increase in flight efficiency as high resolution wind data will enable choice of more favourable winds, resulting in fuel cost saving. 

Increase in environmentally sustainability of aviation operations due to CO2 reduction. 

Ability to plan an optimum flight path and make better fuel load calculations. 

Data Requests 

Users submit a data request, to include latitude, longitude, atmospheric height (in ICAO Pressure Level), date/time and weather parameter specification, to tailor meteorological data to a unique flight profile. This data can be combined with other flight parameters to calculate optimum flight profiles. 

Intended users 

4DT is intended for use by: 

Airlines 

Airports 

ATM  

ANSP 

Flight Planners 

Pilots 

Pricing

4DT is a pay-per-request service. 

All potential users can sign up for a free 30-day trial.  This enables access to high resolution weather data and testing to ascertain potential efficiencies, including fuel cost savings. 

How to access 4DT

To express interest in using the service or to learn more, you can email:  [email protected]

Terms of Reference - 4DT

Read and understand our Terms of Reference

Stay updated

You can stay up to date with all our aviation services including NWR by following our Aviation Services LinkedIn page.