Quality Control Algorithms and Proposed Integration Process for Wind Profilers Used by Launch Vehicle Systems

This paper presents the quality control (QC) process used by National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA/MSFC) to develop an archive of high altitude wind data from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) 50-MHz Doppler Radar Wind Profiler (DRWP). Wind measurements from this system will be used to support analyses of space launch vehicle structural loads from atmospheric winds and in the computation of steering commands. An extensive QC process was applied to 50-MHz DRWP data to remove spurious data caused by various forms of atmospheric and non-atmospheric artifacts. The 50-MHz DRWP archive has been built to eliminate sample-size limitations of currently used databases, which were derived from weather balloon observations. The archive contains wind profiles from approximately 2.7-18.6 km altitude at roughly five minute intervals for the August 1997 to December 2009 period of record, and has been used to produce subset databases of wind pairs, triplets, and sextuplets which contain approximately 100 times as the number of samples available from current temporal change databases. The subsample databases are currently being used by NASA as part of space flight vehicle design to assess loads and trajectory impacts from wind change. By greatly increasing the sample size of near-continuous wind profile measurements, this work will increase launch availability by reducing wind change uncertainties during launch countdown, thus reducing the amount of conservatism necessary for calculating appropriate safety margins. A similar QC process is currently being implemented on the KSC 915-MHz DRWP network, which will provide data from near the surface to the lowest altitude of the 50-MHz DRWP data. In addition to presenting the 50-MHz DRWP QC process, this paper outlines a proposed procedure to utilize data from both the 50-MHz and 915-MHz DRWPs to generate integrated wind profiles over the expanded altitude range from near surface to 18.6 km.