Static Pressure from Aircraft Trailing-Cone Measurements and Numerical Weather-Prediction Analysis

Accurate static-pressure measurements are a prerequisite for safe navigation and precise air-data measurements on aircraft. Pressure is also fundamental for wind and air temperature analysis in meteorology. Static-pressure measurement by aircraft is disturbed by aerodynamics and needs to be corrected using calibration. In this paper, a comparison has been made between static pressure measured by means of a trailing cone in the atmosphere behind two different jet aircraft at flight levels up to 450 and data from numerical weather predictions. The height is derived from differential Global Navigation Satellite System measurements. The Global Navigation Satellite System height is compared to numerical-weather-prediction geopotential height. The numerical-weather-prediction data were provided by the Integrated Forecast System of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. When computing the geopotential with latitude-/height-dependent gravity, the pressure/height differences are −0.01±0.15  hPa an...

[1]  Sean P. Burns,et al.  Improved Wind Measurements on Research Aircraft , 1999 .

[2]  S. B. Healy,et al.  Surface pressure information retrieved from GPS radio occultation measurements , 2013 .

[3]  William J. Hughes,et al.  Using Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Data for Monitoring Aircraft Altimetry System Error , 2010 .

[4]  J. Holton.  An introduction to dynamic meteorology , 2004 .

[5]  Günther Heinemann,et al.  A Review and Practical Guide to In-Flight Calibration for Aircraft Turbulence Sensors , 2013 .

[6]  A. Hollingsworth,et al.  Some aspects of the improvement in skill of numerical weather prediction , 2002 .

[7]  R. Forbes,et al.  Comparison of ECMWF analysis and forecast humidity data with CARIBIC upper troposphere and lower stratosphere observations , 2015 .

[8]  Robert Sharman,et al.  An Integrated Approach to Mid- and Upper-Level Turbulence Forecasting , 2006 .

[9]  Monika Krautstrunk,et al.  The Transition From FALCON to HALO Era Airborne Atmospheric Research , 2012 .

[10]  Robert Sharman,et al.  Aircraft Wake-Vortex Encounter Analysis for Upper Levels , 2015 .

[11]  P. Bénard.  An oblate‐spheroid geopotential approximation for global meteorology , 2014 .

[12]  Ronald B. Smith,et al.  Mountain Waves Entering the Stratosphere , 2008 .

[13]  R.L. Blanchard.  An Improvement to an Algorithm for Computing Aircraft Reference Altitude , 1972, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

[14]  J. Anderson,et al.  Fundamentals of Aerodynamics , 1984 .

[15]  R. Baumann,et al.  Calibration of 3-D wind measurements on a single-engine research aircraft , 2015 .

[16]  Paul D. Groves,et al.  Principles of GNSS, Inertial, and Multi-sensor Integrated Navigation Systems , 2012 .

[17]  M. Wendisch,et al.  ML-CIRRUS : The airborne experiment on natural cirrus and contrail cirrus with the high-altitude long-range research aircraft HALO , 2017 .

[18]  U. Schumann,et al.  Aviation‐induced cirrus and radiation changes at diurnal timescales , 2013 .

[19]  Timothy L. Crawford,et al.  Aircraft wind measurement considering lift-induced upwash , 1996 .

[20]  M. Pitts,et al.  The 2009–2010 Arctic stratospheric winter – general evolution, mountain waves and predictability of an operational weather forecast model , 2011 .

[21]  D. Lenschow,et al.  Calibrating airborne measurements of airspeed, pressure and temperature using a Doppler laser air-motion sensor , 2014 .

[22]  W. Gracey.  Measurement of aircraft speed and altitude , 1981 .

[23]  Linus Magnusson,et al.  Factors Influencing Skill Improvements in the ECMWF Forecasting System , 2013 .

[24]  Christian Kühnlein,et al.  A consistent framework for discrete integrations of soundproof and compressible PDEs of atmospheric dynamics , 2014, J. Comput. Phys..

[25]  Comparison of Model Forecast Skill of Sea Level Pressure along the East and West Coasts of the United States , 2009 .

[26]  Peter Bauer,et al.  The quiet revolution of numerical weather prediction , 2015, Nature.

[27]  A. Simmons,et al.  An Energy and Angular-Momentum Conserving Vertical Finite-Difference Scheme and Hybrid Vertical Coordinates , 1981 .

[28]  Stéphane Laroche,et al.  Estimation of the Added Value of the Absolute Calibration of GPS Radio Occultation Data for Numerical Weather Prediction , 2015 .

[29]  Lars Isaksen,et al.  Use and impact of automated aircraft data in a global 4DVAR data assimilation system , 2003 .

[30]  Edward H. Teets,et al.  Atmospheric analysis for airdata calibration on research aircraft , 1992 .

[31]  W. Paul Menzel,et al.  A Look at the Evolution of Meteorological Satellites: Advancing Capabilities and Meeting User Requirements , 2015 .

[32]  D. Lenschow,et al.  Measurement of Aircraft State and Thermodynamic and Dynamic Variables , 2013 .

[33]  Spheroidal and spherical geopotential approximations , 2014 .

[34]  S. de Haan,et al.  Quality assessment of Automatic Dependent Surveillance Contract (ADS-C) wind and temperature observation from commercial aircraft , 2012 .

[35]  J. Derber,et al.  Variational Correction of Aircraft Temperature Bias in the NCEP’s GSI Analysis System , 2015 .

[36]  N. K. Pavlis,et al.  The development and evaluation of the Earth Gravitational Model 2008 (EGM2008) , 2012 .