The Winter 2010 FRONT/NIRSS in-flight icing detection field campaign

From November 2010 until May 2011, NASA's Icing Remote Sensing System was positioned at Platteville, Colorado between NCAR's S-Pol radar and Colorado State University's CHILL radar (collectively known as 'FRONT', or Front Range Observational Network Testbed'). This location was also underneath the flightpaths of aircraft arriving and departing from Denver's International Airport and other local airports, which allowed for comparison to pilot reports of weather. This presentation outlines how the vertically vertically-pointing, multi-sensor NASA Icing Remote Sensing System's derived liquid water content and in-flight icing hazard profiles can be used as a basic stand alone icing hazard product and can provide in-flight icing verification and validation for the polarized S-band radar signatures during icing and non-icing scenarios. In this work, the authors present case studies to show how NASA's Icing Remote Sensing System can support the polarized radar algorithm development effort. With high temporal resolution range versus height scans from both radars over the NASA system location, detailed synoptic weather timelines for each case are discussed. Further, the polarimetric radar data product, the newly developed algorithms and the NIRSS output have the potential to provide crucial 3-D realtime icing hazard detection capabilities to improve aviation safety in the near-airport environment.