The short answer is no. They tend to be very grateful if you tell them where the major convective cells are with reference to a VOR or Waypoint.
I had a potentially nasty (but brief) exposure to freezing rain near Bournemouth EGHH about 3 years ago, in Class D, on the way back from France. I told them and descended rapidly (to get below the 0C level) while turning away out over the sea. The controller gave me a heading based on his weather radar data so he clearly did have “something” available to him. I have no idea what… maybe he had a web browser with meteox.com though I suspect it was something more real-time.
In France there have been several episodes where ATC sent aircraft into hold in areas with strong convective activity which resulted in in-flight injuries. The BEA wrote a report that recommended that weather radar image overlays were added to ATC scopes.
I believe they actually do have a screen with radar image displayed in the control center, but no at each individual position.
EDIT: I found the report, but only in French.
In Germany, ATC can see precipitation radar as an overlay on their screen.
Interesting, thanks for the answers. Sounds like the answer depends on where one is in Europe. I wonder why, since the rain echo is a free byproduct of any primary radar.
As for my flight, the controller was Bremen Radar, so the picture must have looked different on the radar than I thought. Maybe the showers were widely spaced. (We could only see below the TCUs in a few spots, after all.) Or maybe the precip was snow (== fainter return). Too bad I didn’t think to grab the DWD radar graphic after the flight.
Completely off-topic question, but do the radar scopes in Europe give controllers a view of the primary radar returns from precipitation?
Sweden doesn’t have any primary radar for ATC at all. If they have WX radar overlay, I don’t know, but I doubt it.
Sweden doesn’t have any primary radar for ATC at all.
That is very hard to believe… there is no vectoring in all of Sweden? Not even in the terminal areas of the large airports? Pilots give position reports every few minutes?
I interpret that to mean that they only display the secondary radar return, so if the airplane loses XPDR, there is no echo displayed.
I am pretty sure they must have primary radar. There were plans by several countries to turn off all primary radars for ATC but then there were some serious incidents (not widely publicized) where half of Europe’s ATC was blind twice for some time because of what was supposedly military jamming of the 1030/1090MHz band. After that, plans to turn off primary radars got buried rather quickly.
Without primary radar, ATC is extremely vulnerable to very simple attacks.
What good is a primary radar return in a high traffic environment? Are the data blocks still attached to the echo, although without altitude and other data provided by the XPDR?
