Improved Composite Reflectivity Mosaics in Mountain Terrain for Air Traffic Management

The FAA has developed radar products for the NextGen Weather system that are currently being integrated into the National Airspace System for operational deployment. However, radar data can be degraded by terrain obstructions to the radar beams, and in addition, the curvature of the Earth results in biased sampling at higher altitudes, which results in missing precipitation at lower elevations as range increases. Coverage can be improved by mosaicking several radars together to produce composite radar depictions. However, gaps in coverage and mountain/terrain blockage still remain and result in poor coverage, particularly in the western United States (Cho, J. et al., Radar Coverage Analysis for the Terminal Precipitation on the Glass Program, ATC-450 MIT LL Report, 2022). Machine learning techniques have been developed by the Lincoln Laboratory under the FAA’s Aviation Weather Research Offshore Precipitation Capability (OPC) (Bass, R., S. Kim and W. Bauman, 2021, Offshore Precipitation Capability for Air Traffic Control, Air Traffic Control Association, Technical Symposium) project to generate synthetic weather radar images from other weather data sources, e.g., satellite, numerical weather model data, lightning sensors, etc. These techniques have been demonstrated for air traffic management in oceanic regions with no radar coverage, and have proven beneficial to operations. Preliminary studies have shown that the merging of the synthetic weather radar with NEXRAD radar data can lead to improved products in areas of coverage degraded by terrain (Cuevas, C. et al, Using Deep Learning to Correct Radar Beam Blockage, AMS, New Orleans, LA, 2021, and Avery, K., et al., Deep Learning−Based Correction to Radar Beam Blockage, AMS, Phoenix, AZ, 2019). This study expands on earlier work, and is investigating techniques to improve the Composite Reflectivity in the NextGen Weather mosaics, with the primary focus of providing improved coverage in terminal areas that suffer from degraded composite reflectivity radar data, particularly in the western U.S. Results from this study will be presented as well as a discussion of future directions.

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This material is based upon work supported by the Federal Aviation Administration under Air Force Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0001. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Aviation Administration.