Use of Unconventional Weather Radars on Airborne Platforms to Fill in Operational Radar Data Voids

A grand challenge remains in the radar community: filling in the gaps in operational radar coverages around the world. These gaps exist over oceans and over land due to intervening mountain blockages and large distances between adjacent radars. The gaps have been shown to be mitigated through the employment of shorter wavelength, terrestrial radars and spaceborne instruments. Radars and passive sensors on low-earth orbiting satellites provide high-resolution information through the atmospheric column but are only available once or twice per day. Instruments onboard geostationary satellites provide data at higher spatio-temporal resolution but the brightness temperatures from cloud-top are only indirectly related to storm properties such as surface precipitation rates. This presentation will cover two recent efforts for filling in gaps in NEXRAD with the goals to improve aviation weather information, severe storm monitoring, and precipitation estimation for water resources management and flash flood prediction.

The Airborne Radar Network (AiRNet) project was launched in 2018 between the University of Oklahoma, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and Honeywell Aerospace. The project aims to access real-time data from X-band radars flying onboard commercial aircraft. These data can now be transmitted in real-time. Efforts are underway to explore the resolution requirements of the data and associated costs for accessing and utilizing the data in NOAA operational systems. They offer the potential to fill in radar gaps in the intermountain West and to provide information over oceanic regions. Secondly, the Stratospheric Observations of Earth Systems (SOES) project will be introduced. This project aims to overcome the deficiencies in NEXRAD radar coverage by offering a unique observing vantage point. The project team is collaborating with WorldView to demonstrate radar measurements of storm characteristics including vertical velocity throughout storm lifecycles from a balloon in a quasi-geostrophic orbit in the stratosphere. Success of the SOES pilot project could result in a network of stratospheric balloons equipped with remote sensing instruments to offer unprecedented, high-resolution earth system measurements over data voids and in regions with anticipated high-impact weather, such as tornado outbreaks and land-falling tropical cyclones.