NextGen Surveillance and Weather Radar Capability (NSWRC) Siting Analysis
As the current radars that perform weather and aircraft surveillance
over the United States age, they must be sustained
through service life extension programs or replaced. In the latter
case, the radars can be replaced by multiple types of radars
with different missions or they can be replaced by scalable
multifunction phased array radars (MPARs). State-of-the-art active
phased array systems have the potential to provide improved
capabilities such as earlier detection and better characterization
of hazardous weather phenomena, 3D tracking of noncooperative
aircraft, better avoidance of unwanted clutter sources such
as wind farms, and more graceful performance degradation with
component failure. As the U.S. aviation community works
toward realizing the Next Generation Air Transportation System
(NextGen), achieving improved capabilities for aircraft and
weather surveillance becomes critical, because stricter observation
requirements are believed to be needed. Hence, the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) is considering the MPAR as a possible
solution to their NextGen Surveillance and Weather Radar
Capability (NSWRC).
Cost is one hurdle to the deployment of a modern phased array radar
network. One way of lowering the overall cost is to
reduce the total number of radars. Because of the overlap in coverage
provided by the current radar networks, a unified
MPAR replacement network can potentially decrease the total number of
radars needed to cover the same airspace. An earlier
analysis conducted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory concluded that 510
legacy radars could be effectively replaced by 334 MPARs
over the contiguous United States (CONUS). There was, however, some
uncertainty whether the spatial resolution used in the
terrain blockage calculations was fine enough to accurately depict
radar coverage, and also if terminal area coverage was being
adequately addressed. This study revisits the siting analysis using a
much finer spatial resolution, expands the coverage domain
to include all fifty states and U.S. territories, adds the Air Force
long-range surveillance radars (FPSs) to the legacy pool, and
allows scaling by number of faces per radar. The aim is to provide an
estimate of the minimum number of MPARs needed to
replace the existing radar coverage. We also provide an extensive
statistical compilation of legacy versus MPAR coverage for
various observational performance parameters.
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT C. Distribution authorized
to U.S. Government Agencies and their contractors,
administrative or operational use, 18 May 2012. Other
requests for this document shall be referred to the Federal
Aviation Administration.
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