I'm with BDiONU with this - it's all very well having the facility to have weather superimposed on our radars, but how many times have you,as an ATCO, been asked for a turn by one A/C on a particular route to avoid weather, just to have the next A/C a couple of minutes (or less) behind, fly straight through the 'weather', even when the A/C are the same type..... you even get this happening between A/C of the same company, so it's not just SOPs that dictate what pilots want to do!
Pilots have weather radar and know how to interpret it to the standards required in their company SOPs.... we as ATCOs should let them get on with this, i.e. let them do what they are trained for, whilst they let us do what we are trained to do - (for example - don't use TCAS as a pseudo ATC radar
).
If the weather is soo bad, we will be putting MDIs etc on to reduce the traffic to enable us to cope... having weather info on our radars would not change this.
When there is weather about, we have enough on our plates as ATCOS making sure that we keep A/C that would not ordinarily be traffic to each other, or indeed would not even normally be in our sector safely separated....
trying to be 'slick' and pass weather info to every pilot, or offer vectors to every pilot when a) they can see the weather themselves and b) it might not even be significant to them, can only make our job harder, or at least it will decrease our efficiency and distract us from our main task i.e. seperating A/C!
In TC, our GS suites have a weather radar so the GS can give us an indication that there is weather about, and give us the general trend of it.
At Swanwick in the AC OPS room, their may be an argument that as every position is manned by two ATCOS (TAC/Planner), then the planners display could have weather super-imposed on it - but merely for information.
Just my two pennies worth... I think th esystem works as it is, but it is dependant on pilots ASKING for deviation, not telling us they have commenced it!