Improving meteorological information to air transport

Meteorological information and services supporting the various operations of air transport enable a safe, efficient and cost-effective operating environment for airspace users, air navigation service providers and air traffic management. The continuing pursuit towards an improved quality of observation, forecasting and decision support services is driven by an increasingly weather-sensitive society and growing impacts of hazardous weather events. This thesis provides an overview of the field of aeronautical meteorological research by introducing the organisations involved, global and regional strategies, impacts of weather on air transport, current state of the art in meteorological research and decision support systems serving air transport needs with a view of where the field should evolve next. This thesis is an attempt to highlight key findings and point the reader towards the direction of further research on the given topics. Research supporting air transport operations with the optimal use of weather information is a specialized field where advances are led by the needs of various airspace users. Research institutions for example in the United States have contributed greatly due to the severe weather impacts experienced by the National Airspace System (NAS), the ability of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to direct long-term funding to solve specific aviation-related research questions. The creation and maintenance of long-lived teams of scientists and engineers working together to produce end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of the aviation industry is the key to improving meteorological information to aviation users while university research is typically shorter duration and typical does not result in operational systems. From a global perspective, research is yet to be organised in a way that would contribute to solving aviation issues beyond single research projects and/or programmes. There is a lot more the scientific community could do to develop tailored information to decision support systems used by the aviation sector, but it would require systematic investments and the establishment of research groups focusing on the applied science questions and technology transfer. This thesis provides an overview of recommended decision support system development topics with an outline of potential milestones.Tieto ilmakehän nykyisestä ja tulevasta tilasta sekä tätä tietoa ilmailun tarpeisiin tuottavat palvelut mahdollistavat turvallisen, toimivan sekä kustannustehokkaan toimintaympäristön ilmatilan käyttäjille, ilmailun palveluiden tuottajille sekä ilmatilan hallintaa toteuttaville tahoille. Vaarallisille sääilmiöille herkemmäksi kehittyvä yhteiskunta vaatii havaintojen, ennusteiden sekä päätöksenteon tukijärjestelmien jatkuvaa kehittämistä asiakkaiden tarpeisiin. Tämä lisensiaatintutkielma tarjoaa maailmanlaajuisen yleiskatsauksen ilmailun sääpalveluiden tutkimukseen ja tuotekehitykseen pyrkimyksenään esitellä keskeiset toimijat, alueelliset ja kansalliset kehittämisohjelmat ja strategiat, sään vaikutukset ilmailulle, ilmailun sääpalveluiden nykytila sekä tulevaisuuden toimintaympäristön edellyttämät uudet lentosääpalvelut. Tavoitteena on korostaa ilmailun kannalta tärkeimpiä meteorologisia kehityskohteita ja ohjata lukija jo tehdyn tutkimuksen pariin. Ilmailun toimintoja tukevien sääpalveluiden kehittämiseen tähtäävä tutkimus on hyvin soveltava erikoisala, missä asiakkaiden tarpeet määrittävät tutkimuskohteet. Kehitys on keskittynyt voimakkaasti Yhdysvaltoihin, mihin on syynä kapasiteetin äärirajoilla toimiva ilmatila sekä kyky rahoittaa pitkäkestoisia meteorologisia tutkimushankkeita ilmailun tarpeisiin. Meteorologian tutkijoiden ja insinöörien pitkäkestoinen yhteistyö tuottaa koko arvoketjun kattavia projekteja, joiden lopputuloksena syntyy asiakkaan tarpeisiin räätälöityjä palveluita hyödyntäen yliopistoissa tehtävää tutkimusta sekä tietoteknisten ratkaisujen kehittymistä. Maailmanlaajuisesti katsottuna ilmailun sääpalveluiden tutkimusta ja tuotekehitystä ei ole toistaiseksi järjestetty yhtenäisen strategian tai tavoitteiden alle. Tieteellinen yhteisö pystyisi kasvattamaan merkittävästi panostaan ilmailun turvallisuuden kehittämiseksi, mikäli tuotekehityksen rahoitus organisoitaisiin paremmin ja osaaminen keskitettäisiin soveltavan tutkimuksen ryhmiin. Tämä tutkielma sisältää suosituksia päätöksenteon tukijärjestelmiin integroitavista sääpalveluista, joiden avulla säätilan vaikutus lentotoiminnalle voidaan viedä suoraan päätöksentekotasolle. Tutkielmassa esitettyjen projektiaihioiden tarkoituksena esittää konkreettisia toimenpiteitä, joilla varmistutaan tutkimuksen soveltuvuudesta loppukäyttäjien toimintaan

Improving meteorological information to air transport

Meteorological information and services supporting the various operations of air transport enable a safe, efficient and cost-effective operating environment for airspace users, air navigation service providers and air traffic management. The continuing pursuit towards an improved quality of observation, forecasting and decision support services is driven by an increasingly weather-sensitive society and growing impacts of hazardous weather events. This thesis provides an overview of the field of aeronautical meteorological research by introducing the organisations involved, global and regional strategies, impacts of weather on air transport, current state of the art in meteorological research and decision support systems serving air transport needs with a view of where the field should evolve next. This thesis is an attempt to highlight key findings and point the reader towards the direction of further research on the given topics. Research supporting air transport operations with the optimal use of weather information is a specialized field where advances are led by the needs of various airspace users. Research institutions for example in the United States have contributed greatly due to the severe weather impacts experienced by the National Airspace System (NAS), the ability of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to direct long-term funding to solve specific aviation-related research questions. The creation and maintenance of long-lived teams of scientists and engineers working together to produce end-to-end solutions that meet the needs of the aviation industry is the key to improving meteorological information to aviation users while university research is typically shorter duration and typical does not result in operational systems. From a global perspective, research is yet to be organised in a way that would contribute to solving aviation issues beyond single research projects and/or programmes. There is a lot more the scientific community could do to develop tailored information to decision support systems used by the aviation sector, but it would require systematic investments and the establishment of research groups focusing on the applied science questions and technology transfer. This thesis provides an overview of recommended decision support system development topics with an outline of potential milestones

Bridge Inspection: Human Performance, Unmanned Aerial Systems and Automation

Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) have become of considerable private and commercial interest for a variety of jobs and entertainment in the past 10 years. This paper is a literature review of the state of practice for the United States bridge inspection programs and outlines how automated and unmanned bridge inspections can be made suitable for present and future needs. At its best, current technology limits UAS use to an assistive tool for the inspector to perform a bridge inspection faster, safer, and without traffic closure. The major challenges for UASs are satisfying restrictive Federal Aviation Administration regulations, control issues in a GPS-denied environment, pilot expenses and availability, time and cost allocated to tuning, maintenance, post-processing time, and acceptance of the collected data by bridge owners. Using UASs with self-navigation abilities and improving image-processing algorithms to provide results near real-time could revolutionize the bridge inspection industry by providing accurate, multi-use, autonomous three-dimensional models and damage identification

Subspace-based methodologies for the non-cooperative identification of aircraft by means of a synthetic database of radar signatures

Una de las principales preocupaciones dentro del mundo de la aviación es la identificación rápida, eficaz y fiable de cualquier objeto observado que se encuentre a cualquier distancia y bajo cualquier condición atmosférica. Gracias a los avances en tecnología radar, esto se ha conseguido. De hecho, los radares son los sensores más adecuados para el reconocimiento de blancos en vuelo ya que pueden operar en cualquier condición. El reconocimiento de blancos mediante radar es hoy un hecho, existiendo sistemas IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) capaces de comunicarse con una aeronave haciendo posible que ella misma se identifique por sí sola. Sin embargo, esta necesidad de comunicación directa puede ser un inconveniente en ciertos momentos. Así, aparecen las técnicas no cooperativas o NCTI (Non-Cooperative Target Identification), que no establecen ninguna comunicación con el blanco y normalmente hacen uso de radares de alta resolución. Éstos ven los blancos como compuestos por diversos puntos que dispersan la energía emitida por el radar, generando así una imagen de la reflectividad de un blanco, lo que se ha llamado su firma radar. Comparando dicha firma radar con una base de datos de firmas radar de blancos conocidos es posible establecer, mediante una serie de algoritmos de identificación, el tipo de blanco iluminado por el radar. Uno de los temas más cuestionados es cómo poblar y actualizar esta base de datos de firmas radar. De manera ideal, la base de datos debería de contener medidas de blancos reales en vuelo; desafortunadamente, la principal desventaja de esta estrategia radica en la dificultad de obtener firmas radar de aviones neutrales o enemigos. Por esta razón, esta tesis propone utilizar firmas radar de blancos ideales, generadas mediante simulaciones electromagnéticas, como base de datos. Con el avance de las herramientas de predicción electromagnética es posible obtener de manera rápida y a bajo coste firmas radar de cualquier blanco deseado y en cualquier orientación. De este modo, el principal objetivo de esta tesis yace en el desarrollo de algoritmos eficientes de identificación de aeronaves en vuelo de manera no cooperativa, con altas tasas de acierto y empleando una base de datos de blancos obtenida mediante simulación electromagnética. El escenario propuesto consiste en la comparación de firmas radar reales obtenidas en una campaña de medidas con una base de datos compuesta por firmas radar simuladas, con ello se pretende por un lado, simular un escenario más realista, en el que las firmas de los blancos recogidas por el radar no tienen porqué tener la misma calidad que aquellas de la base de datos y por otro, comprobar que la identificación de un avión real mediante simulaciones es posible

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically

Advanced Aviation Weather Radar Data Processing and Real-Time Implementations

The objectives of this dissertation work are developing an enhanced intelligent radar signal and data processing framework for aviation hazard detection, classification and monitoring, and real-time implementation on massive parallel platforms. Variety of radar sensor platforms are used to prove the concept including airborne precipitation radar and different ground weather radars. As a focused example of the proposed approach, this research applies evolutionary machine learning technology to turbulence level classification for civil aviation. An artificial neural network (ANN) machine learning approach based on radar observation is developed for classifying the cubed root of the Eddy Dissipation Rate (EDR), a widely-accepted measure of turbulence intensity. The approach is validated using typhoon weather data collected by Hong Kong Observatory’s (HKO) Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) located near Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) and comparing HKO-TDWR EDR$^{1/3}$ detections and predictions with in situ EDR$^{1/3}$ measured by commercial aircrafts. The testing results verified that machine learning approach performs reasonably well for both detecting and predicting tasks. As the preliminary step to explore the possibility of acceleration by integrating General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit (GPGPU), this research introduces a practical approach to implement real-time processing algorithms for general surveillance radar based on NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs). The pulse compression algorithms are implemented using compute unified device architecture (CUDA) libraries such as CUDA basic linear algebra subroutines and CUDA fast Fourier transform library, which are adopted from open source libraries and optimized for the NVIDIA GPUs. For more advanced, adaptive processing algorithms such as adaptive pulse compression, customized kernel optimization is investigated. A statistical optimization approach is developed for this purpose without needing much knowledge of the physical configurations of the kernels. It was found that the kernel optimization approach can significantly improve the performance. Benchmark performance is compared with the CPU performance in terms of processing accelerations. The proposed implementation framework can be used in various radar systems including ground-based phased array radar, airborne sense and avoid radar, and aerospace surveillance radar. After the investigation of the GPGPU on radar signal processing chain, the benchmark of applying machine learning approach on embedded GPU platform was performed. According to the performance, real-time requirement of the machine learning method of turbulence detection developed in this research could be met as well as Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) restrictions on embedded GPGPU platforms

Aircraft Wake Vortex State-of-the-Art & Research Needs

This report has been compiled by the partners of the WakeNet3-Europe consortium with the support of several external experts. It describes the present international state-of-the-art in wake vortex research and application focusing on recent developments in the various involved disciplines and specifically evaluates research activities needed in order to provide operational benefits in line with ongoing SESAR developments, in response to ACARE goals and following Europes vision for aviation, Flightpath 2050. Document type: Boo

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 267)

This bibliography lists 661 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in June, 1991. Subject coverage includes design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment and systems; ground support systems; theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics; electrical engineering; aircraft control; remote sensing; computer sciences; nuclear physics; and social sciences

Proceedings Of The 18th Annual Meeting Of The Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (Aogs 2021)

The 18th Annual Meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS 2021) was held from 1st to 6th August 2021. This proceedings volume includes selected extended abstracts from a challenging array of presentations at this conference. The AOGS Annual Meeting is a leading venue for professional interaction among researchers and practitioners, covering diverse disciplines of geosciences

Aeronautical engineering: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 295)

This bibliography lists 581 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System in Sep. 1993. Subject coverage includes: design, construction and testing of aircraft and aircraft engines; aircraft components, equipment, and systems; ground support systems; and theoretical and applied aspects of aerodynamics and general fluid dynamics