Austrian new dual polarized C-band weather radar network for aeronautical meteorology

Nowcasting of thunderstorm events has high impact on flight safety and efficiency for air traffic management. Future strategic planning by air traffic control will result in circumnavigation of potential hazardous areas and the anticipation of avoidance maneuvers. Weather radar data are used extensively to facilitate such forecasts. Within the project AAA4ATM (Analysis of Available Airspace for Air Traffic Management) computer vision algorithms for detection of objects, feature extraction, 3D tracking and extrapolation as well as down- and up-scaling strategies in meteorological image processing, blending to NWP model and forecaster intervention are used for a time frame up to six hours. Austrocontrol, the civil air service provider in Austria operates therefore a new installed polarized C-band weather radar network. These data offer new polarimetric nowcasting applications and effective quality improvements for aeronautical purpose. Special focus in Austria is given to the mountainous surrounding of the Alps and the operation of radar sites located at high altitudes, where especially winter weather is challenging for the monitoring of polarimetric variables. Beside this weather radar upgrade project, we have changed our operational radar visualization system. The new system is Visual Weather, which is able to ingest polar, polarimetric radar data using different data formats. This offers again the full capabilities of 3D data handling (e.g. arbitrary cross sections) for nowcasting and storm scale analyses. Last, radar data are used by sensor fusion for automatic detection of convective elements for AUTOMETAR observations.