Wind Hazard and Turbulence Monitoring Atairports With Lidar, Radar, and Mode-S Downlinks: The UFO Project

This article presents the prospects of measurement systems for wind hazards and turbulence at airports, which have been explored in the Ultrafast Wind Sensors (UFO) project. At France’s Toulouse–Blagnac Airport, in situ, profiling, and scanning sensors have been used to collect measurements, from which wind vectors and turbulence intensities are estimated. A scanning 1.5-µm coherent Doppler lidar and a solid state X-band Doppler radar have been developed with improved update rates, spatial resolution, and coverage. In addition, Mode-S data downlinks have been collected for data analysis. Wind vector and turbulence intensity retrieval techniques are applied to demonstrate the capabilities of these measurement systems. An optimal combination of remote measurement systems is defined for all weather monitoring at airports. In this combination, lidar and radar systems are complementary for clear-air and rainy conditions, which are formulated in terms of visibility and rain rate. The added value of the measurement systems for high-resolution numerical weather prediction models is estimated by an observing system experiment, and a positive impact on the local wind forecast is demonstrated