When Rick Curtis, Chief Meteorologist for Southwest Airlines, walks down the hallway, he is often asked, “What does this week look like?” For Curtis, it’s the universal question that comes to him from every level of management—frankly, just about everyone at Southwest has a stake in the answer.
What concerns the executives is the one uncertain element that Southwest, the largest domestic carrier in the United States and one of the best run and most profitable airlines in the world, cannot control. And that, of course, is the weather.
Weather delays are not only infuriating for travelers stewing in airports eating bad pizza—they also cost the airlines more than $1 billion a year. Revenues evaporate with every plane grounded by snow or hurricanes, and are siphoned by jets flying around thunderstorms. Southwest won’t release an exact dollar amount, but they say weather delays make up a considerable part of annual revenue loss.
With so much money at stake, not to mention travelers’ patience on a low boil, airlines perennially strive to manage uncertain weather. They can’t control nature, but they can improve their responses to it. To do this they need better forecasts. Airlines and airports also hedge against the weather’s wrath by utilizing complex financial instruments called weather derivatives.
Since the first jet flew the unfriendly skies, commercial airlines have used weather forecasts to help them operate. And it’s worked. Travelers may be surprised to learn that the amount of delayed flights declined from 2003 to 2012, largely because of improvements in forecasting.
But for Southwest, that’s not enough. Curtis, who wanted to be a meteorologist since he was 10, explains that a large part of his job is keeping Southwest operating as efficiently as possible by staying on top of the latest in forecasting technology.
During one week in April, when snow carpeting airport runways in Denver and Minneapolis brought the rate of flights down from 100 to less than 25 an hour, Curtis was attentively watching the live stream of weather data on his five monitors at Southwest’s Dallas headquarters.
“When airline executives make a call to ground traffic or resume flights, it’s largely riding on the information I give them,” he explains. “I have to be able to tell them with a minimum of 75 percent certainty that a weather event is imminent.”
That week, Curtis’s forecast helped dispatchers make the call to ground planes before the first flurries touched down on the tarmac. To calculate when to resume flights, Curtis had to know how individual weather conditions—from freezing rain, to lightning, to thunderstorms—affect the operation of the plane. Freezing rain, for example, can ground flights for hours, not so much because it interferes with flying but because the ice that forms on the wingtips can alter the aerodynamics and lead to loss of steering. And it’s a painstaking, manual process to clean the ice off, requiring extra ground crew.
Weather delays cost the airlines more than $1 billion a year.
As the biggest air carrier in the states, Southwest has about 700 planes aloft daily, with most doing as many as six or seven flights per day throughout the contiguous United States. Of course delays or cancellations cost the airlines money, but it’s the rerouted flights that hurt their pocketbook the most. Not surprisingly, when an airline has had a year of high revenue loss due to weather, consumers can feel it in the shape of fare hikes the year after.
The most expensive weather related situation is when ground conditions are too treacherous for a plane to land. “No plane can land during a thunderstorm,” Curtis says, “and thunderstorms are the most common weather event.” Airlines now have approximately 18 minutes of warning time before the skies open and unleash a torrent. This is not nearly as much time as Curtis would like.
Unlike many airlines that are structured as hub-and-spoke operations, Southwest flies along straight line routes extended over 97 cities. So when a plane originating in Denver is diverted, Southwest has to make additional stopovers, guzzling a lot of fuel in the process.
“Jet fuel,” explains Curtis, “is an airline’s number one expense, consuming 36 percent of Southwest’s costs.” Forcing a plane to travel another 200 miles adds to the tab, as does storing heavy spare fuel on board in what is known as the “contingency bucket,” which all planes must do in case of a reroute.
Given the huge costs of detours and the high volume of traffic, it is easy to understand how advances in weather forecasting and planning could save airlines money typically lost to re-routed, delayed, or cancelled flights. So getting the best data is imperative to Curtis.
It might come as a surprise to learn that, up until recently, all the major carriers depended on the same free data provided by the National Weather Service (NWS).
This free data is very good, and has only been getting better. The airlines are about to enjoy a big windfall in this regard, with the NWS’s upcoming 2015 launch of the upgraded Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system (GOES). The satellites will offer real-time detection of lightning and thunderstorms. Some meteorologists believe that GOES will substantially increase warning times for thunderstorms. Within 10 years, the goal is to quadruple today’s lead times, and to anticipate twisters 60 minutes before they form.
Until recently, all the major carriers depended on the same free data provided by the National Weather Service.
The NWS also recently upgraded all 160 stations in its national radar network to use a technology known as Dual Polarization Doppler Radar. This offers a two-dimensional picture of precipitation from near ground level to almost 70,000 feet, which is about 35,000 feet above where planes fly. The modeling is so textured now that forecasters could “see” a debris ball rotating in the sky inside the recent twister in Moore, Okla. Similarly, hail and rain are identifiable by their shapes on the radar image.
In addition to these advances in public data, private companies have learned that they can turn weather information into a lucrative business and are bringing their own contributions to the table. The Weather Channel has a professional forecasting arm, called Weather Services International (WSI). IBM is creating Deep Thunder, which uses IBM’s advanced computing power to generate a three-dimensional model that depicts the weather in high temporal and spatial resolution. It’s information that Southwest and other carriers, eager for as much warning time as possible, may well be willing to pay for.
These airlines are also taking forecasting into their own hands. Southwest installed water vapor sensors on the bellies of 90 aircraft in its fleet. Data from these sensors provide information on precipitation levels, which helps forecasts to be more accurate and reduces the uncertainty associated with turbulence, which is caused by changing air currents.
The next time your flight is delayed due to inclement weather, just remember—we’ve come a long way from forecasting as it was done a century ago, when the NWS sent up weather balloons twice a day. And it’s only getting better.
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