The performance of wind profiling radars for wind field monitoring in airport areas compared to other remote sensing and in-situ systems

Abstract

Many meteorological services operate ground-based observing systems for wind shear warning. In this study, wind shear data from a 1 GHz profiler at the airport Zurich was compared with data obtained from the ground-based AMETIS 1 system. Despite the short observation campaign (four weeks), the data indicate clearly that the ground -based system underestimates the shear and that wind direction data is influenced by topography. Comparisons were made for both for the basic wind data (speed and direction) as well as for shear data. Since air traffic is likely to disturb radar-based wind finding, the effect of overflying aircraft on the wind data obtained from the wind profiling radar was investigated. This analysis was based on the quality of the consensus average. While there is undoubtedly an effect on the spectra, the quality of the wind data iself is only marginally affected by air traffic, this effect is statistically not significant. The potential of other wind shear systems is discussed in quantitative terms.

Keywords

• meteorological services
• wind shear
• topography
• consensus average
• meteorologische dienste
• windscherungen
• topographie
• consens-averaging