88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Wednesday, 23 January 2008
Recent Meteorological Data Collection and Analysis In Support of United States Wake Turbulence Program
Exhibit Hall B (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Hadi S. Wassaf, Volpe Center, Research and Innovative Technologies Administration (RITA), Cambridge, MA; and A. Tabrizi and W. Frank
Poster PDF (192.5 kB)
The evolution and decay of aircraft vortices has been shown to depend on meteorological parameters. An active wake turbulence program in the United States, jointly formulated initially by FAA and NASA, has been ongoing since 2003. As part of the wake turbulence program, a series of atmospheric boundary layer wind, temperature and turbulence characterizations have been made at Denver International Airport (DEN) as well as St Louis Lambert International Airport (STL). The purpose of the current paper is to first describe the various measurements that have been done to date, the associated results on the uncertainties and bias in the fundamental measurements, and highlight the representative results collected from a 106 feet tower. Special care is taken in choosing the data to be included in this analysis. Wind angle restrictions are used to exclude data that may have been affected by the turbulent flow shed from probe mounting structures and the tower itself. In addition, particular attention was paid to the quality control and statistical characterization and inter-comparison of the Turbulent Kinetic Energy (TKE) and Eddy Dissipation Rate (EDR) data collected from DEN and STL. Examples of the data quality assurance included, but not limited to, automated and robust search for the inertial subrange, coherence test of longitudinal and lateral wind fluctuations. Current and future efforts to extend the turbulence characterization to higher altitudes will also be described

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