Rapid advancement of novel technologies based on lidars and/or small weather radars and their penetration into operational practice worldwide result in the fact that the detection of low level wind shear is being transformed into an integration and evaluation of multi-platform observations.
Since the company MicroStep-MIS currently offers only a traditional, and in some aspects outdated technology of low level wind shear detection (based on synchronized wind observation by anemometers), it was time to decide to upgrade this alerting system by having a lidar-based technology integrated.
For this reason, the research project A Novel Method for Low-level Wind Shear Alert Calculation from Data Measured by LIDAR with a financial support from the Slovak Research and Development Agency has started in 2016 (with the expected end of the project in 2020). Within this project, we purchased a 3D wind Doppler lidar Windcube 200S. Its maximum typical range, which is about 6 km for the PPI and RHI scenarios represents a medium scale performance among the Windcube product range.
The lidar is to be installed at the M. R. Štefánik Airport in Bratislava, approximately by the end of February, 2018. We hope that during the duration of the research project, we will be able to collect and analyze a large number of synoptic situations with wind shear, and develop our own, automatic, lidar-based low level wind shear alert system.
