88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Thursday, 24 January 2008: 1:30 PM
Aviation applications of Doppler LIDAR – experience in Hong Kong
226-227 (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
P. W. Chan, Hong Kong Observatory, Hong Kong, China; and C. M. Shun
Poster PDF (2.1 MB)
The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) introduced a Doppler LIDAR to the Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) in 2002, the first LIDAR for aviation alerting services in the world. Since then, HKO has developed a number of weather products based on the LIDAR's velocity and backscatter power data. LIDAR is found to provide crucial information in a wide variety of aviation applications. This presentation gives a review of the experience in Hong Kong in the development of aviation-related weather products using the LIDAR data. Applications include: automatic windshear alerting from the HKO-developed glide-path scans, detection of low-level turbulence, 2D wind retrieval for intense convective events from LIDAR-radar dual Doppler analysis, 3D wind retrieval from a single LIDAR for terrain-disrupted airflow, visibility map based on backscatter power distribution in conical scans, and mixing-height monitoring in vertical scans. Future plan of LIDAR deployment at HKIA will also be discussed.

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