Wind shears, peak gusts and directional shifts impact many operations at KSC/CCAS, especially the Space Shuttle launch and recovery. A number of launch aborts are due to uncertainties concerning current wind conditions. An increasing number of wind systems are coming on-line, providing data with different formats and temporal and spatial characteristics. They are not currently (except in the forecaster's mind) assimilated into a real-time, unified, time-dependent 3-D representation of the volumetric wind field. Phase I proposes to investigate several data ingest and assimilation software systems to ascertain if these can be reconfigured and upgraded to meet the sponsor's needs, which include the creation of a single, integrated wind profile from the surface to 70,000 feet at any specified location in the KSC/CCAS domain in real-time. We propose to test two candidate systems, LAPS, developed by NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory and its descendant, ADAS, developed by the Center for the Prediction of Storms, University of Oklahoma. If these tests are successful, features from these systems will serve, with required enhancements, as the basis of a System Design for a fully configured, turn-key system to be delivered in Phase II.
Potential Commercial Applications:New sources of wind (and other) meteorological data are becoming ever more available, including observations from boundary layer and tropospheric profilers, NEXRAD radars, Doppler Sodars and state and regional mesonetworks. Software systems will be required to ingest, assimilate, analyze and display these new data resources for a wide variety of purposes. Applications would include creating diagnostic wind and stability fields as inputs to emergency response models at nuclear and chemical plants. Regional pollution control agencies or their consultants require wind and turbulence fields to drive complex photochemical grid modules used in regional ozone forecasting and emission control planning. Running in data-rich regions in a hindcast mode, the proposed system would produce high resolution meteorological inputs more cost effectively than would full-featured mesobeta-beta or meso-gamma prognostic models. The proposed analysis systems configured for complex terrain could provide short term wind energy forecast systems for the growing number of planned wind turbine farms.
