Publications

The primary fields that provide weather situational awareness in the Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) are radar-derived vertically-integrated liquid (VIL) and echo top height (ET). In situations of reduced or non-existent radar coverage, such as over the oceans, in mountainous terrain or during periods of radar outages, the radar VIL and ET fields are severely compromised or even absent. In these situations, the lightning data are often unaffected and fully available to use as a proxy for the radar fields in convective weather nowcasts. The purpose of this study is to develop the capability to utilize cloud-to-ground lightning strike data as a proxy for radar VIL and echo tops (ET) in the CIWS. The datasets used in this study are the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN) and the 1 km/5min radar VIL and ET mosaics produced at MIT LL. To capture the synoptic variability of the lightning-VIL and lightning-ET relationships over the CIWS domain, atmospheric variables from the NOAA Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) model and the Space-time Mesoscale Analysis System (STMAS) are utilized with the lightning data in a statistical regression framework. Once spatially and temporally coherent regions of VIL and ET derived from the lightning are produced, the potential exists for tracking these regions and providing accurate short-term forecasting of convective hazards.

A fundamental function of any aviation weather system is to provide accurate and timely weather information tailored to the specific air traffic situations for which a system is designed. Weather location and intensity are of prime importance to such systems. Knowledge of the weather provides "nowcasting" functionality in the terminal and en route air spaces. It also is used as input into aviation weather forecasting applications for purposes such as storm tracking, storm growth and decay trends, and convective initiation. Weather radar products are the primary source of the weather location and intensity information used by the aviation weather systems. In the United States, the primary radar sources are the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) and the Weather Surveillance Radar 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D, known as NEXRAD). Additional weather radar products from the Canadian network are used by some of the aviation weather systems. Product quality from all these radars directly impacts the quality of the down stream products created by the aviation weather systems and their utility to air traffic controllers. Four FAA weather systems use some combination of products from the aforementioned radars. They are the Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS), the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS), the Weather and Radar Processor (WARP), and the Medium Intensity Airport Weather System (MIAWS). This paper focuses on the improvement of weather radar data quality specific to CIWS. The other mentioned FAA aviation weather systems also benefit either directly or indirectly from the improvements noted in this paper. For CIWS, the legacy data quality practices involve two steps. Step one is the creation of weather radar products of highest possible fidelity. The second step involves creating a mosaic from these products. The mosaic creation process takes advantage of inter-radar product comparisons to interject a further level of improved data quality. The new CIWS data quality plan will use a mounting evidence data quality classifier technique currently being developed. The technique applies a multi-tiered approach to weather radar data quality. Its premise is that no single data quality improvement technique is as effective as a collaboration of many. The evidence will be expanded to include data and products from the radars along with data from additional sensing platforms. The mosaic creation process will correspondingly expand to take advantage of the additional evidence. Section 2 covers data quality of products from the single radar perspective. Section 3 focuses on the use of satellite data as the first additional sensing platform to augment removal of problematic radar contamination. Section 4 describes the data quality procedures associated with creation of mosaics from the single radar products augmented with new satellite masking information. Last, Section 5 discusses future plans for the mounting evidence data quality improvement technique.

This chapter focuses on the computational complexity of the front-end of the surface moving-target indication (SMTI) radar application. SMTI radars can require over one trillion operations per second of computation for wideband systems. The adaptive beamforming performed in SMTI radars is one of the major computational complexity drivers. The goal of the SMTI radar is to process the received signals to detect targets while rejecting clutter returns and noise. The radar must also mitigate interference from unintentional sources such as RF systems transmitting in the same band and from jammers that may be intentionally trying to mask targets. The pulse compression stage filters the data to concentrate the signal energy of a relatively long transmitted radar pulse into a short pulse response. The relative range rate between the radar and the ground along the line of sight of the sidelobe may be the same as range rate of the target detected in the mainbeam.

Current U.S. weather and aircraft surveillance radar networks vary in age from 10 to more than 40 years. Ongoing sustainment and upgrade programs can keep these operating in the near to mid-term, but the responsible agencies National Weather Service (NWS), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Homeland Security (DHS) recognize that large-scale replacement activities must begin during the next decade. The National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT) in Norman, Oklahoma, is a multiagency project demonstrating operational weather measurements capability enhancements that could be realized using electronically steered phased-array radars as a replacement for the current Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D). FAA support for the NWRT and related efforts address air traffic control (ATC) and homeland defense surveillance missions that could be simultaneously accomplished using the agile-beam capability of a phased array weather radar network. In this paper, we discuss technology issues, operational considerations, and cost trades associated with the concept of replacing current national surveillance radars with a single network of multimission phased array radars (MPAR). We begin by describing the current U.S. national weather and aircraft surveillance radar networks and their technical parameters. The airspace coverage and surveillance capabilities of these existing radars provide a starting point for defining requirements for the next-generation airspace surveillance system. We next describe a conceptual MPAR high-level system design and our initial development and testing of critical subsystems. This work, in turn, has provided a solid basis for estimating MPAR costs for comparison with existing, mechanically scanned operational surveillance radars. To assess the numbers of MPARs that would need to be procured, we present a conceptual MPAR network configuration that duplicates airspace coverage provided by current operational radars. Finally, we discuss how the improved surveillance capabilities of MPAR could be utilized to more effectively meet the weather and aircraft surveillance needs of U.S. civil and military agencies.

A novel RCS component prediction model approach to producing both fast and accurate scattering from an electrically large open-ended cylindrical cavity (circular cross section) is presented. The component model is a hybrid approach which easily permits individual scattering mechanisms to be coherently combined to produce a high fidelity signature. For this problem, the component model included scattering produced from the interior of the cavity calculated via the waveguide modal approach combined with the scattering produced from the cavity's finite thick rim opening (i.e., annulus) computed via the Method of Moments (MoM) and finally combined with the cavity's external base ring edge diffraction computed via PTD. Narrowband and wideband signature analysis for the circular cylindrical cavity configuration are presented to validate the component prediction model with static range measurements, and another prediction result computed using MoM for X- band frequencies and linear polarization. Excellent agreement is achieved among the data sets: measurement and prediction (component and MoM model).

Details of a technical study that was part of a larger investigation assessing terminal weather services impacts of decommissioning the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) are presented. Effects on two key areas for safety and delay-reduction benefits are examined: low-altitude wind shear visibility and the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) Terminals Winds (TWINS) product. It is concluded that the information conted provided by the TDWR cannot, in general, be effectively replaced by other candidate radar systems such as the Airport Surveillance Radar (ASR-9) equipped with a Weather Systems Processor (WSP) or the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD).

Current U.S. weather and aircraft surveillance radar networks vary in age from 10 to more than 40 years. Ongoing sustainment and upgrade programs can keep these operating in the near to mid term, but the responsible agencies (FAA, NWS and DoD/DHS) recognize that large-scale replacement activities must begin during the next decade. In addition, these agencies are re-evaluating their operational requirements for radar surveillance. FAA has announced that next generation air traffic control (ATC) will be based on Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) (Scardina, 2002) rather than current primary and secondary radars. ADS-B, however, requires verification and back-up services which could be provided by retaining or replacing primary ATC radars.

Weather radars rely on the presence of radiowave scattering entities such as hydrometeors and insects to sense the dynamic evolution of the atmosphere. Under clear-air, low-reflectivity conditions, when no such "visible" tracers are present, air mass boundaries such as the outflow edge of a dry microburst may go undetected. Recently, a radar data processing technique was developed to estimate the near-ground atmospheric refractivity field using ground targets. Refractivity is dependent on the moist thermodynamic variables of the atmosphere and, thus, can be used to detect air mass changes and boundaries. In this study, we apply this technique for the first time to Airport Surveillance Radar-9 (ASR-9) Weather Systems Processor (WSP) data. Comparisons with measurements from a meteorological station show good consistency. The potential exists for improving the capability of the WSP to detect low-reflectivity wind-shear phenomena by adding interest information provided by the estimated refractivity field. Adequate computational power is the sole requirement for implementing this scheme; aside from that, no alteration or addition is necessary to the ASR-9 hardware. Its primary weakness is the sensitivity to vertical variation in refractivity and variance of target height. It also has a limited range of coverage (~20 km), but that is acceptable for terminal-area coverage. Further testing is needed during more appropriate meteorological conditions and at other sites to prove that dry wind-shear events can really be detected in the derived refractivity field by this class of radar, and that the technique is robust under various topographical settings.

An active phased array radar with distributed low-peak-power transmit modules requires pulse compression to provide high sensitivity and fine range resolution. A long transmitted pulse, however, has accompanying problems such as a near-range blind zone for the transmitting channel and a loss of other gate data (dead gates) in other channels for a multichannel system. In this report the trade-off between the benefits and costs of pulse compression (lengthening) for multifunction phased array radars (MPARs) are analyzed. Specific results are presented for a three-channel MPAR and a two-channel terminal-area MPAR (TMPAR) that have been proposed as replacement systems for current U.S. civil-sector aircraft anad weather surveillance radar systems. The recommended maximum compression ratio is 130 ofr the MPAR and 80 for the TMPAR. The results are independent of radar peak power and antenna gain, and represent upper bounds. Acutal pulse compression ratios that would be employed are likely to be somewhat less tha these values, based on fulfilling specific sensitivity and scan-time requirements with specific radar physical parameters.

A radar data quality control (QC) system is being developed for the real-time, continuously updateable NOWCAST system at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL-NOWCAST) in Monterey, California. NRL has developed its own new radar QC algorithms, and is also working with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies at the University of Oklahoma (NSSL-OU) to obtain, adapt, integrate, test and install various types of recently-developed radar QC algorithms for use with NRL-NOWCAST. These algorithms work with volume scans of full-resolution Doppler radar data. Radar data QC can be divided into two categories: echo classification (EC) and calibration. New EC algorithms have recently demonstrated substantial success at separating the radar echoes of precipitation from other echo types, such as noise, normal propagation (NP) and anomalous propagation (AP) ground clutter, sea clutter, insects/clear-air, birds, second-trip echoes, and constant power function (CPF) artifacts. Radar data calibration methods assess the accuracy of both the data values and data coordinates. One calibration issue is aliased radial velocity data from precipitation and insect/clear-air returns, which if correctly de-aliased, afford the opportunity to estimate winds. Another calibration issue of concern to NRL is the processing of radar data from mobile platforms, such as US Navy ships. This processing requires corrections to the radial velocity data and the data-coordinates for the motion of the platform, as well as corrections for the altitude of the data coordinates due to the AP of the radar beam that frequently occurs within surface and evaporation ducts of the marine atmosphere. The goal of this work is to test the performance of the most current and promising radar data QC algorithms on archived data sets, both from ground- and sea-based radars, in order to determine the optimal combination for future real-time use within NRL-NOWCAST. NRL-NOWCAST currently ingests full-resolution Doppler radar data from both the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) network and the US Department of Defense (DoD) Supplemental Weather Radar (SWR) at the Naval Air Station (NAS) in Fallon, NV. Various products are then created from these data for NRL-NOWCAST display. The radar data are also ingested into the COAMPS-0S (R) (Geiszler et al. 2004) data assimilation system at NRL. Figure 1 shows a flow chart that summarizes the processing stages and uses of radar data at NRL. Figure 2 shows an example of the NRL-NOWCAST demonstration site currently set up at Fallon, where the specific products displayed are only a few from a large list that may be chosen by the forecasters at the NAS. This paper presents a brief overview of the concepts behind the various EC and radial velocity de-aliasing algorithms under consideration. Test results from an NRL algorithm-testing platform will also be presented along with some previously published test results from the authors. Additional test results from the platform will be presented at the conference. Methods to address data-value and data coordinate calibration problems associated with Doppler radars onboard US Navy ships are currently being studied; a discussion on future work in this area will be outlined.