Aircraft Detection and Tracking on the National Weather Radar Testbed

Phased array technology has been used to for aircraft detection and tracking for years. More recently, this same technology has been demonstrated on the National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT) for rapid scanning of weather phenomena. Consequently, this technology can serve as a proving ground for the Multi-function Phased Array Radar (MPAR) network of radars satisfying both aircraft and weather missions of the FAA and NWS, respectively. Thus, as part of the project to simultaneously scan for weather while tracking aircraft, the moving target detection and tracking has been implemented on the NWRT in Norman, OK. The main challenge of such approach is the distribution of time between weather and aircraft scans. Naturally, interlacing weather and aircraft scans should not significantly degrade either mission; hence, an acceptable balance needs to be found to successfully accomplish both missions. In this work, the implementation of the aircraft detector and tracker will be discussed and examples of outputs from an interlaced weather and aircraft scans will be given.