High-resolution wind and temperature observations from aircraft tracked by Mode-S air traffic control radar

Abstract

[1] Wind, temperature, and humidity observations from radiosonde and aircraft are the main sources of upper air information for meteorology. For mesoscale meteorology, the horizontal coverage of radiosondes is too sparse. Aircraft observations through Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay (AMDAR) sample an atmospheric profile in the vicinity of airports. However, not all aircraft are equipped with AMDAR or have the system activated. Observations inferred from an enhanced tracking and ranging (TAR) air traffic control radar can fill this gap. These radars follows all aircraft in the airspace visible to the radar for air traffic management. The TAR radar at Schiphol airport in Netherlands has a range of 270 km. This Mode-S radar contacts each aircraft every 4 s on which the transponder in the aircraft responds with a message that contains information on flight level, direction, and speed. Combined with the ground track of an aircraft, meteorological information on temperature and wind can be inferred from this information. Because all aircraft are required to respond to the TAR radar, the data volume is extremely large, being around 1.5 million observations per day. Note that there are no extra costs for this data link. The quality of these observations is assessed by comparison to numerical weather prediction (NWP) model information, AMDAR observations, and radiosonde observations. A preprocessing step is applied to enhance the quality of wind and temperature observations, albeit with a reduced time frequency of one observation of horizontal wind vector and temperature per aircraft per minute. Nevertheless, the number of observations per day is still very large. In this paper it is shown that temperature observations from Mode-S, even after corrections, are not very good; an RMS which is twice as large as AMDAR is observed when compared to NWP. In contrast to the temperature observations, the quality found for wind after correction and calibration is good; it is comparable to AMDAR, slightly worse than radiosonde but certainly very valuable for mesoscale NWP.