Convective Weather Impact on Airspace Capacity: A Comparison between Permeability and Workload Based Approaches

Convective weather is one of the major aviation hazards 
impacting air traffic in domains from airports to en-route 
operations. Convective cells can pose a significant safety hazard 
due to severe weather phenomena, such as hail, lightning, icing, 
and turbulence. For this reason, pilots usually tend to avoid 
convective areas, either planning longer trajectories pre-flight or 
tactically flying around them. These actions can result in large 
deviations from optimal routes and imbalances in sector demand
capacity loads in neighboring airspace. These could lead to ripple 
effects impacting the overall network and causing inefficiencies 
that need to be tactically managed by the Air Navigation Service 
Providers (ANSPs). Proactively managing these disruptions and 
capacity imbalances is crucial to planning and implementing 
effective Air Traffic Flow and Capacity Management (ATFCM). 
In this study, we compared two approaches for evaluating airspace 
capacity under convective weather conditions based on airspace 
permeability and controller workload. These two methodologies 
are used primarily for US and European airspace respectively, 
where the actions allowed to mitigate convective weather impacts 
are slightly different. For the permeability-based approach, the 
FAA Traffic Flow Impact (TFI) decision-support tool’s underlying 
model is presented to illustrate the approach. For the workload 
approach, the results obtained from the SESAR3 Industrial 
Research Project HARMONIC Solution 382 are presented, 
showing a new methodology for the sector's workload assessment 
with the presence of convective areas based on the use of additional 
ATC tasks. The methods are compared to identify strengths and 
weaknesses, as well as best practices that can be leveraged from 
each approach which can help inform future R&D priorities.