| << | Profiling of Wind | >> |
Abstract
The tracking and ranging (TAR) radar of Schiphol airport follows all aircrafts in the airspace around the Netherlands for air-traffic control. This enhanced radar contacts each aircraft every four seconds on which the transponder in the aircraft responds with a radio message which contains information on flight level, direction and speed. Together with the ground track of an aircraft, meteorological information on temperature and wind can be inferred from this information. Because all aircrafts are required to respond to the TAR-radar, the data volume is extremely large, being around 1.5 million observations.
The quality of these observations is assessed by comparison to AMDAR and numerical weather prediction (NWP) model information. A method to improve the temperature and wind observations is applied to obtain good quality wind and temperature observations, albeit with a reduced time frequency of one observation of horizontal wind vector and temperature per aircraft per minute. These real-time observations are used as input in each hourly cycle of the HIRLAM NWP-model. The impact of these observation on the short-range weather forecasts will be discussed.