A system that gives cockpit warnings to pilots about bumpy air has been tested for the past month in some airliners flying east of the Rocky Mountains and feedback from pilots has been favourable. "The messages I've received in the cockpit gave a very accurate picture of turbulence location and intensity," Captain Rocky Stone, chief technical pilot for United Air Lines, told editors at Weatherwise Magazine. "The detection of turbulence intensity provides an unprecedented and extremely valuable new tool for pilot situational awareness." The system uses a formula developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and is called Nexrad Turbulence Detection Algorithm (NTDA). It works by analyzing wind distribution data gathered by radar sites and crunching the resulting numbers into predictions of where the ride will get rough.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/news/turbulence-detection-system-works