Evolving Scientific Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR) towards an Operational APAR

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), and with funding through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun the development of the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR), as a next generation airborne radar for meteorological observations of clouds and precipitation and characterization of extreme weather phenomena. APAR is intended to be a dual-polarized active electronically scanned array (AESA) attached to the NSF/NCAR C-130 scientific research aircraft. UCAR/NCAR has funded Ball Aerospace to develop the AESA system that will remain scientifically relevant over the intended 20 year lifetime of the APAR system. The effort recently was kicked off and is ongoing with a scheduled Critical Design Review (CDR) in December 2024.

While the scientific APAR system is intended primarily to be utilized by the weather science community, NOAA and other governmental agencies may be interested in utilizing APAR, or similar technologies developed on APAR, on their operational weather monitoring platforms. These operational platforms may have different concept of operations (CONOPS) than the scientific NCAR platform. This presentation will discuss some of these potential CONOPS differences, the impacts on the APAR system operation and the modifications, if any, required on the currently developed APAR system to successfully perform the weather monitoring mission. These differences may include the mounting locations and methods of the AESA on the aircraft body, system accessibility and maintainability aspects, system operational flexibility, along with differences in captured weather data transfer needs. In addition to pointing out differences, this presentation will also discuss that the architecture developed on the current APAR effort can be utilized for both applications and platforms with minimal subsystem differences and cost impacts.