Understanding the Visibility Supply Chain

Poor atmospheric visibility is a leading cause of aviation accidents. This paper explores the “visibility supply chain,” how these data are collected, how they are consumed, the current challenges, and efforts being made to provide better data to pilots. In particular, Federal Aviation Administration’s and NASA’s stated interests in Supplemental Data Providers and Weather Information Providers have led to a new standard by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) on data quality; this paper also describes experiences by a team that developed a new visibility estimator to comply with this standard. It concludes with a discussion about our team’s attempt at providing a low-cost solution for the acquisition of visibility data using machine learning, instantiated in multiple modalities, including a standalone sensor and a mobile application.