Use of Commercial, Airborne Weather Radars to Fill in Operational Network Gaps

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 a new effort 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 with the aim to access real-time data from X-band radars flying onboard most corporate and commercial jets. Presently, these data are being visualized in the cockpit and then are discarded. It is possible to transmit these data down to the ground in real-time. To date, project participants have obtained global samples of flight tracking data. These data have been used in a feasibility study to assess their potential impact in filling in known gaps in NEXRAD coverages in the intermountain West and beyond. Furthermore, we will present initial findings with a sample of airborne radar data.