Development of a New Airport Unusual-Weather Detection System With Aircraft Surveillance Information

Abstract

This paper proposes a new aviation unusual-weather detection system constructed to augment existing aviation unusual-weather alert systems. Due to a lack of ground meteorological stations with sufficient ground altitude near airports, existing aviation unusual-weather alert systems can only detect unusual-weather conditions near the ground surface. Thus, this paper uses the automatic dependent surveillance—broadcast (ADS-B) signal transmitted by commercial aircraft to acquire vertical weather information for low-level weather conditions. Specifically, we propose an aviation unusual-weather detection model to establish the system using both the aircraft irregular-movement detection algorithm and the machine learning method. The performance of the proposed unusual-weather detection model is validated with actual ADS-B signals from several flights collected at the airport. The experiment results show the accuracy rates of aviation normal/unusual-weather classification above 96% and false positive rates below 1% for decent flight phases.