Sensors and Systems to Enhance Aviation Safety Against Weather Hazards

Weather-related factors are among major causes of aviation hazards, passenger discomfort, poor airline schedule-keeping, and poor operating economy. A variety of new high-technology electronic sensors and systems for aviation weather are being developed and installed across the US. The aviation weather monitoring system of the future will be centered around Doppler weather radars which offer the best combination of coverage, resolution, and agility for this purpose, and are able to detect and estimate the severity of atmospheric air motion, including wind shear and turbulence, directly. Three major new Doppler radar systems are pertinent: the Next Generation Weather Radar, the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, and the Airport Surveillance Radar with a dedicated weather channel. Other relatively simple new instruments for aviation weather support include the Low Level Wind Shear Alert System, the Doppler Wind Profilers, the Automated Weather Observation System, and the Automated Surface Observation System. These systems are designed to perform higher level functions such as detection, characterization, and hazard potential estimation of aviation-significant weather phenomena, as well as their communication and display automatically. Together with conventional information sources and data from improved satellite imagers and sounders, the modern dedicated weather surveillance systems hold the potential of being powerful tools in enhancing the quality of aviation well into the next century