Narrative:

Company had a planned computer outage tonight; which cleared out all notams. Then when the program came back; I received 1;115 NOTAM cancel and added messages for the 34 stations selected on my sector. This is more than enough messages to sort through. Situational awareness for the station's suitability gets too hard to keep track of. I understand things like this happen on rare occasion; but it highlights the need for a better way of selecting the stations we need to watch on a daily basis verses the dozens of other stations we'll watch once or twice a month but are still selected in our sector's display. As stated above; I have 34 stations I am monitoring; yet I'm only using 6. The current process of selecting or deselecting a station is a very tedious and time consuming event (just for one station). Again; it is a tedious process that has to be done each time for surface observations; tafs; notams; field conditions; etc. Removing unnecessary stations is a practice not often performed in the office due to the tedious nature and potential for setting up your relief for problems if stations are removed that are normally in there and expected to be. In my opinion if there was an easy to use command to: clear all; add multiple stations at once; remove multiple stations at once; etc.; situational awareness would improve for every work station. Again this issue today only highlights the daily non essential 'garbage' message we have to sort through in order to find the info we really want to see. Weather messages constantly coming in for driftdown; and hardly ever used alternate stations; along with taxiway NOTAMS for any station we are using or not create a workload that is not needed. Sometimes looking away for a few minutes performing another task can quickly add close to a hundred weather messages on a midnight shift if there happens to be widespread showers or IFR conditions (I'm not exaggerating about the message count either; check for yourselves). And out of those close to a hundred messages; I may only need to know a handful of those. Yet there is a good potential of useful messages getting lost in the shuffle and time critical messages not gotten to in time due to the other useless messages needed to be sifted through first.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: An air carrier Dispatcher discussed the overwhelming burden of excessive routine station data with no means of eliminating the wheat from the chaff.

Narrative: Company had a planned computer outage tonight; which cleared out all NOTAMs. Then when the program came back; I received 1;115 NOTAM cancel and added messages for the 34 stations selected on my sector. This is more than enough messages to sort through. Situational awareness for the station's suitability gets too hard to keep track of. I understand things like this happen on rare occasion; but it highlights the need for a better way of selecting the stations we NEED to watch on a daily basis verses the dozens of other stations we'll watch once or twice a month but are still selected in our sector's display. As stated above; I have 34 stations I am monitoring; yet I'm only using 6. The current process of selecting or deselecting a station is a very tedious and time consuming event (just for one station). Again; it is a tedious process that has to be done each time for surface observations; TAFs; NOTAMs; field conditions; etc. Removing unnecessary stations is a practice not often performed in the office due to the tedious nature and potential for setting up your relief for problems if stations are removed that are normally in there and expected to be. In my opinion if there was an easy to use command to: clear all; add multiple stations at once; remove multiple stations at once; etc.; situational awareness would improve for every work station. Again this issue today only highlights the daily non essential 'garbage' message we have to sort through in order to find the info we really want to see. Weather messages constantly coming in for driftdown; and hardly ever used alternate stations; along with taxiway NOTAMS for any station we are using or not create a workload that is not needed. Sometimes looking away for a few minutes performing another task can quickly add close to a hundred weather messages on a midnight shift if there happens to be widespread showers or IFR conditions (I'm not exaggerating about the message count either; check for yourselves). And out of those close to a hundred messages; I may only need to know a handful of those. Yet there is a good potential of useful messages getting lost in the shuffle and time critical messages not gotten to in time due to the other useless messages needed to be sifted through first.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.