Numerous successful civil airport environmental studies, public relations programs, and noise and operations monitoring systems have demonstrated the value of air terminal radar data in engineering analyses and public presentations. Current data playback technology uses the continuously recorded data from the Federal Aviation Administrations' Automated Terminal Radar System (ARTS) to identify the location of aircraft flight corridors, determine variability in aircraft climb and descent procedures, and correlate with measured community noise levels. The value of radar data lies in improved credibility and defensibility of environmental documents, often leading to reduced costs and delays in environmental proceedings. Most military airfields, however, are not served by ARTS radar systems. They employ a DOD equivalent which, unfortunately, has no data recording capability. Hence, there is no way for the technologies developed in the civil arena to benefit the military. The technical objective of this proposal is to develop a concept demonstration prototype of a portable, low-cost, state-of-the-art system which would acquire and store radar information from military systems. To complete this concept demonstration, the data captured by the system would be replayed using an HMMH software product, FLIGHT, designed for managing large radar databases for use with environmental noise analyses.
