Characteristics of wind profiles derived from the GPS based Automated Meteorological Profiling System (AMPS)

The Automated Meteorological Profiling System (AMPS) is a balloon based sounding system using a differential, code correlating GPS implementation for wind profiling. The AMPS is designed to replace aging systems at the Eastern and Western Space Launch Ranges. The AMPS can automatically produce wind and temperature profiles from multiple balloon flights in near real time. There are two different AMPS flight elements. The high resolution flight element is designed around the jimsphere and provides a wind only profile to approximately 17 Km. The low resolution flight element uses standard balloons to loft a sonde that provides both wind and thermodynamic data. First articles delivered to both ranges have undergone extensive testing. Results are presented from numerous flights at both ranges designed to characterize wind measurement performance in terms of both effective vertical resolution and precision. Tests include a significant number of simultaneous releases of both types of AMPS flight elements together with radar tracked jimspheres. In most circumstances, wind profiles derived from the AMPS high resolution flight element are found to contain less high frequency noise than radar tracked jimspheres. The performance of the low resolution flight element is found to depend in part on the length of the train used to suspend the sonde below the balloon. Results are presented from numerous tests using train lengths of 21m and 30m.