In-flight Icing Hazard Verification with NASA's Icing Remote Sensing System for Development of a NEXRAD Icing Hazard Level Algorithm

From November 2010 until May of 2011, NASA's Icing Remote Sensing System was positioned at Platteville, Colorado between the National Science Foundation's S-Pol radar and Colorado State University's CHILL radar (collectively known as FRONT, or ‘Front Range Observational Network Testbed’). This location was also underneath the flight-path of aircraft arriving and departing from Denver's International Airport, which allowed for comparison to pilot reports of in-flight icing. This work outlines how the NASA Icing Remote Sensing System's derived liquid water content and in-flight icing hazard profiles can be used to provide in-flight icing verification and validation during icing and non-icing scenarios with the purpose of comparing these times to profiles of polarized moment data from the two nearby research radars.

In this work, the authors present case studies to show how NASA's Icing Remote Sensing System can support the effort to develop a polarized S-band radar ‘Icing Hazard Level’ algorithm. With high temporal resolution range versus height scans from both radars over the NASA system location, detailed synoptic and micro-scale weather timelines for each case are analyzed. The new radar product, when combined with NIRSS, would provide crucial real-time hazard detection capabilities to improve aviation safety in the near-airport environment.