Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere

About Me:

Jim Frimel received his BEE in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Fenn College of Engineering at Cleveland State University (1991).   His areas of interest include software and systems engineering involving weather information systems relating to weather hazards for the aviation community. His scope ranges from data ingest, systems integration, to display systems and technologies in support of operational forecaster productivity and decision support tools for increasing the safety and efficiency of the National Air Space. From 1995 to 2008, he has worked at CIRA as a research engineer in support of the Aviation Systems Development and Deployment Branch of the Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado. During this time he has worked on the development and support of experimental tools for operational forecasters at National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices and Center Weather Service Unit facilities.

 His recent work has focused on the Volcanic Ash Coordination Tool project which is investigating the collaborative approaches and needs of agencies involved in generating Volcanic Ash Advisories (CIRA Magazine, Volume 27, Spring 2007) and the Traffic Management Unit project, researching the weather information needs of the TMU by CWSU operational forecasters providing direct weather support for the FAA Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) Traffic Managers.

The TMU project.

The TMU project is being staged at the FAA’s Air Route Traffic Control Center’s (ARTCC) Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU), Fort Worth, Texas. These displays are showing NCWF2 impacted High Use Jet Routes over Texas and A “go-no-go”, approach to traffic route and flow information. What is important to understand about the Weather Information Decision Aids (WIDA) web content page is that it is a complete end-to-end system with a web display that provides useful information assisting in tactical and strategic decision making. This is a suit of systems that involves AWIPS, FXC, content Generation for the web, and a decision aids database. This is a decision aid tool centered on the forecaster in the loop concept for helping to keep and create a more consistent, relevant, and accurate Weather Information Decision Aid (WIDA) product available for TMU managers. The consistency and power comes from the fact that all these systems are now tied and share the same data source and allows for forecaster input to update and override this information which in turn gets propagated and updated throughout the system.