Federal Aviation Administration Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System Research to Operations Accomplishments

The role of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) William J. Hughes Technical Center (WJHTC) Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) System is to provide research to operations accomplishments for the aviation community. The system at the WJHTC facilitates evaluations of various MRMS products in a prototype aviation environment and provides valuable feedback to guide future Research and Development (R&D) directions. MRMS integrates operational weather radars from CONUS and Canada and generates a 3-D national radar mosaic every 30 seconds with 1 km horizontal resolution. The MRMS 3-D radar mosaic technique is currently undergoing implementation at NOAA/NCEP for operational data assimilation. With any new radar data, there is research and development of the quality assurance schemes for the new data, scientifically merging the new network into the MRMS system, and developing new products based on requirements from the operational aviation community. Regarding polarimetric radar techniques for aviation weather applications, initial studies have shown improved capabilities of polarimetric radar data to help discriminate between different types of hydrometeors (e.g., hail vs. rain and liquid vs. frozen in winter). This will be useful for airport de-icing operations as well as for in-flight icing hazard warnings.

This presentation focuses on the aviation component of the MRMS system, and provides an overview of the system's research and development accomplishments at the FAA Technical Center.