83rd Annual

Monday, 10 February 2003: 1:30 PM
The 21st Century’s Airport Weather Reporting System
Patrick L. Kelly, Coastal Environmental Systems, Seattle, WA; and G. L. Stringer, E. Tseo, D. M. Ellefson, M. Lydon, and D. Buckshnis
Poster PDF (299.2 kB)
Coastal Environmental Systems is building and delivering their latest in a line of Airport Weather Monitoring and Reporting systems. It is designed to be modular and easy to expand from the smallest to the largest airfields. A complete sensor suite (calculated values in parenthesis) is: wind speed and direction (wind gust), relative humidity, (dew point), temperature, visibility, present weather (answering the question – is it rain or snow, and falling at what rate), total precipitation, cloud height (several layers), presence of ice, detection of lightning and direction (nearby or approaching), (obscuration reporting), (Runway Visual Range (RVR)), barometric pressure and (altimeter setting). Other parameters will be calculated concerning the pressure and winds. A second or even a third grouping of certain sensors may be located elsewhere on the runway, or on another runway at the same airfield.

All sensor data will be collected by the ZENO®-3200 and then sent via cable, radio or fiber optics to a PC/Server running Airport Weather Advisor™. This sends data to the Ground-to-Air (GTA) radio as well as distribute the information to various displays, printers, a LAN, WAN, or other connection. The data presented will be in the METAR format and will consist of One-Minute Observations (updated every 5 seconds), Hourly Reports, and SPECI Reports.

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