FedEx anthill

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These fascinating tracks circumnavigating an approaching storm was posted on airshowbuzz: http://airshowbuzz.com/videos/view.php?v=47d9d709
What's the story?
Best regards

[Spitoon]

Looks like some very competent vectoring and handling of wx avoidance.

[Scott Voigt]

No story per se...

It's what we do day in and day out during thunderstorm season in the US... You keep feeding aircraft into an airport until a pilot says I am NOT going to do that <G>, then you put them all in holding until they want to go somewhere else... This is also a midnight shift, so all you basicly see is the freight folks going into MEM and not a lot of other folks flying about. Do this during the day time and it goes nuts <G>...

regards

Scott

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Thanks, Scott! Just realised you haven't retired from the PPRUNE forum. :D
(Firefighter and (traffic-)policeman. Also part of air traffic control!)

[ayrprox]

amazing video. Must have been a real pain to shoot the gaps in the weather. well done all. quick couple of questions to scott/other us based controllers. does your radar kit allow you to display the weather on the radar?if so is it on all the time or as a kind of map overlay that you can select/deselect?

[Married a Canadian]

In Toronto it is an overlay that you can select deselect at leisure.

It is not entirely accurate....thunderstorms and lightening strikes can be over 20 mins old.

We normally go with what the aircraft are telling us is ahead.

[Scott Voigt]

In the enroute environment you have what we call WARP (Weather and Radar Processor) which overlays the NEXRAD radar picture. We only show three levels of weather though, medium, heavy and extreme (what we have come with to call it.), the lighter stuff is filtered out to help get rid of ground clutter and such.

We can both deselect it and also show it by stratification. The system is not the greatest though for knowing exactly where the weather is level wise. We will show heavy precip in an area and have aircraft fly right through it saying that nothing is there, mainly due to it either being above them or below them, we have no way of really knowing until we get a pilot report. So it can be decieving as to what it displays.

As of this week, we are no longer allowed for the most part to use the stratification feature, and we aren't supposed to turn it off either.

regards

Scott

PS. I wish I could upload a picture to show you what it looks like.