With the rapid development and penetration of novel technologies, the traditional, anemometer-based system of low-level wind shear detection gets gradually into the background. This system is being replaced by a combination of Doppler weather radar and Doppler lidar, mostly due to their compactness, ease of their installation, operation, and maintenance, their ability to monitor the target area more thoroughly, and due to the fact that such a combined system can cover the entire spectrum of meteorological phenomena both in the wet atmosphere (radar) and in dry one (lidar).
For this reason, our company decided to follow the global trends, and we purchased a 3D wind Doppler lidar Leosphere Windcube 200S. The development of the low-level wind shear alert system was carried out within the research project A Novel Method for Low-level Wind Shear Alert Calculation from Data Measured by LIDAR, with financial support from the Slovak Research and Development Agency, in the period from July 2016 till June 2020. The lidar was installed at the M. R. Štefánik Airport in Bratislava in June 2018. Since that time, the lidar has been in the test operation. We detected hundreds of interesting and sometimes dangerous meteorological situations (thermodynamic inversions, cold fronts, gust fronts, etc.), analyzed and categorized them, so we built a huge database of lidar observations of a size of several tens of gigabytes.
Our self-developed wind shear alert system estimates the headwind/tailwind profile for the typical glide path for each runway, applies criteria for dangerous wind shear, identifies sectors at glide path with significant headwind loss/gain, and finally, composes wind shear alerts in compliance with the ICAO regulations. One of the most important features of this system that it is independent of the lidar itself, i.e., it can be set up with any lidar of other manufacturers.
The results of the research project have persistently been published both at commercial forums (expos and/or exhibitions) and within the scientific community, via presentations at international conferences and publications in scientific journals such as the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (read the article here). Moreover, we prepared a comprehensive presentation on the low-level wind shear alert system, and, in a broader sense, on the use of the lidar technology in aviation that is available online, both in Slovak and English languages.
