AIRPORT EYES WEATHER DATA AUTOMATION

The Cape Girardeau airport is scheduled to become a part of a nationwide automated weather reporting network in September 1993, a spokesman for the National Weather Service in Kansas City said Friday.

The network, called the Automated Surface Observation System (ASOS), is sponsored by the U.S. departments of Commerce, Transportation and Defense. When fully operational, ASOS will provide an automated weather reporting system to meet weather and aviation safety responsibilities of the National Weather Service, the Federal Aviation Administration and the military.

Weather service spokesman Rob McWilliams said the system will speed up transmission of local weather data, not only to aviation interests, but to weather service personnel.

McWilliams explained the system will replace the manual weather observations - now done once an hour, 24 hours a day, at 260 weather service stations, involving 1,200 full- and part-time weather observers.

McWilliams said representatives of the local weather contractor will meet this week at the Cape Girardeau airport with Airport Manager, Mark Seesing and others to conduct a site survey and discuss plans for installation of the ASOS unit here.

The Cape Girardeau airport is one of 53 sites in seven states that will have operational ASOS units by the end of 1993, McWilliams said.

Although it will be an automated system, current plans call for the ASOS unit here to be backed up by personnel from Midwest Weather, Inc., the private contractor that now takes the hourly weather observations at the Cape airport for the FAA and the weather service.

If there is a failure of the system or one or more of the weather sensors, Midwest Weather personnel would take the hourly weather observations and transmit the data over the network. The local staff will also provide additional visual and audible weather data, such as lightning, thunder, or hail, that currently cannot be detected by ASOS.

Plans call for sensors to be installed at the airport. The sensors will observe temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and precipitation.

Inside, the local ASOS will include a high-tech computer system with two desktop video display units and a printer. The computer system will be able to check the sensors, encode the weather data for automatic transmission on the ASOS weather reporting network, and, at the same time, make frequent checks of its operations to make sure everything is functioning properly.

The airport control tower here will have a video display to receive the weather observations as they are transmitted on the network. Tower personnel would keep track of airport visibility and transmit that information on the ASOS network if the visibility at the airport drops below four miles.

McWilliams said ASOS will eventually operate 24 hours a day at up to 1,700 locations, providing vital weather data on barometric pressure, temperature, wind direction and speed, runway visibility, cloud-ceiling heights, and precipitation.

The ASOS sites include nearly 600 airports under FAA jurisdiction, including Cape Girardeau, 250 National Weather Service facilities, 86 Navy sites and two Air Force sites.

Initially, 54 ASOS units are being installed this summer in parts of Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Weather data observed by ASOS sensors will be transmitted directly to warning and forecast offices and local airport control towers. A computer-generated voice will broadcast weather information directly to pilots in the air.

The weather service said ASOS is a major step toward improved severe weather warning and aviation safety.

During the next five years, the weather service said, over 1,700 ASOS units will be installed at an estimated cost of over $200 million. Many will be at smaller airports that have no source of weather observations locally.

The ASOS project began in April 1988 when the Commerce Department awarded contracts to develop and test ASOS systems. The production contract was awarded earlier this year after extensive testing, the weather service said.