Retrieving atmospheric turbulence information from regular commercial aircraft using Mode-S and ADS-B

Abstract

Abstract. Navigational information broadcast by commercial aircraft in the form of Mode-S EHS (Mode-S Enhanced Surveillance) and ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) messages can be considered a new source of upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric turbulence estimates. A set of three processing methods is proposed and analysed using a quality record of turbulence encounters made by a research aircraft.The proposed methods are based on processing the vertical acceleration or the background wind into the eddy dissipation rate. Turbulence intensity can be estimated using the standard content of the Mode-S EHS/ADS-B.The results are based on a Mode-S EHS/ADS-B data set generated synthetically based on the transmissions from the research aircraft. This data set was validated using the overlapping record of the Mode-S EHS/ADS-B received from the same research aircraft. The turbulence intensity, meaning the eddy dissipation rate, obtained from the proposed methods based on the Mode-S EHS/ADS-B is compared with the value obtained using on-board accelerometer. The results of the comparison indicate the potential of the methods. The advantages and limitation of the presented approaches are discussed.

Estimating Turbulence Kinetic Energy Dissipation Rates in the Numerically Simulated Stratocumulus Cloud-Top Mixing Layer: Evaluation of Different Methods

“…Indirect methods are based on the inertial-range arguments that follow from Kolmogorov's hypotheses (Kolmogorov 1941;Albertson et al 1997). Such methods are commonly used in the analysis of low-and moderate-resolution velocity time series of in situ airborne measurements (Sharman et al 2014;Kopeć et al 2016a). In the case of fully resolved velocity signals, the direct methods, based on measuring the mean variance of velocity fluctuation gradients, can be applied.…”

Novel approaches to estimating the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate from low- and moderate-resolution velocity fluctuation time series

“…Interestingly, Kopeć et al (2016) have shown that the dissipation rates estimated from such N L using very lowresolution signals, although underestimated, were proportional to calculated using structure functions scaling in the inertial range. In the follow up analyses we found that this is also the case for moderate-resolution airborne data from different sources.…”

Characteristics of the Derived Energy Dissipation Rate using the 1-Hz Commercial Aircraft Quick Access Recorder (QAR) Data

“…Possible candidates for the real-time data are the navigational information of commercial aircraft such as the ADS-B and Mode-S EHS. Given that the set-up for the ADS-B or Mode-S EHS receiving stations does not require a lot of work or money for transmission of the data, EDR estimates from ADS-B and Mode-S EHS (e.g., Kopeć et al, 2016) could greatly support the construction of a turbulence database and statistics globally, together with on-board based (both fine and coarse) EDR measurements (e.g., Sharman et al, 2014;Gill, 2014) and other sources of data like radiosonde, weather radars, and lidars (e.g., Bodini et al, 2019;Ko et al, 2019;Kim et al, 2021aKim et al, , 2021b. We leave the real time experiment as a future study, because it requires a huge amount of additional works to set up the receivers, to conduct the real-time quality control, and so on (e.g., de Haan, 2011;Stone and Pearce, 2016).…”