Wind Estimation From Radar Tracker Data.
Daniel Delahaye
(ENAC - Toulouse)
Accurate wind magnitude and direction estimation is essential for
aircraft trajectory prediction. For instance, based on
these data, one may compute entry and exit times from a sector or detect potential
conflict between aircraft. Since the
flight path has to be computed and updated on real time for such applications, wind
information has to be available in
real time too.The wind data which are currently available through meteorological service
broadcast suffer from small
measurement rate with respect to location and time. In this paper, a
new wind estimation method based on radar track measures is
proposed. When on board true air speed measures are available, a linear
model is developed for which a Kalman filter is used to produce high
quality wind estimate. When only aircraft position measures are
available, an observability analysis shows that wind may be estimated
only if trajectories have one or two turns depending of the number of
aircraft located in a given area. Based on this observability
conditions, closed forms of the wind has been developed for the one
and two aircraft cases. By this mean, each aircraft can be seen as a wind sensor when it
is turning.
After performing evaluations in realistic frameworks, our approach is able to estimate
the wind vectors accurately.
Based on those local wind estimates, a global
space-time wind field estimation using vector splines is interpolated in order to produce
wind maps in the area of
interest.The underline model for wind field computation is Shallow-Water, which assumes
geostrophic wind. The accuracy
of this wind map is dependent of the number wind estimates in a given zone. Further
improvements to the
estimation can be made by correlating with meteorological measurements.
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